The Digital Markets Act, or DMA, is a piece of EU legislation created with the stated aim of fostering competition and user choice, principally by forcing larger companies to make their products and platforms more accommodating to and interoperable with those made by the smaller ones. Unsurprisingly, it proved unpopular with the tech giants, but despite significant pushback, it came into force in May 2023 and continues to operate to this day.
Apple is particularly unhappy about the DMA, which makes it difficult to cultivate digital monopolies and “walled gardens,” such as the iOS app ecosystem. The legislation has consistently pushed Apple towards allowing “sideloading,” or the installation on the iPhone of apps from non-official sources, and thanks to the DMA, users in the EU can even delete the official App Store app.
In March 2025, the EU cited the DMA in ordering Apple to open up iOS connectivity features, a decision Apple decried as “bad for our products and for our European users.” Then, in April of the same year, the company was fined roughly $570m after its contract terms concerning alternative app distribution were found to breach the DMA.
All in all, the legislation has proved deeply inconvenient for Apple. European regulators, unsurprisingly, do not feel the same. And in the European Commission review of the DMA’s first two years, published at the end of April, it was praised in lavish terms:
The DMA has already had a positive impact on the contestability and fairness of digital markets during the short period it has been in application. The DMA has significantly changed the conduct, technical design choices, and contractual arrangements of gatekeepers, which has begun to open up new opportunities for business users and competitors. The DMA has also strengthened end-user autonomy and agency in several key areas by empowering citizens to take back control over their data and make their own choices.
All very complimentary. But Apple has now hit back. Speaking in an interview with German-language Handelsblatt, spotted by AppleInsider, Kyle Andeer, Apple’s chief compliance officer and VP of corporate law, accused the review of being “self-serving.”
“We had hoped that the review would prompt some sober reflection for the EU,” he said (via Google Translate). But instead, what emerged was “a kind of self-serving defense… After all, they were evaluating their own work.”
In the interview, Andeer insisted that the DMA has not yet caused any loss of revenue for Apple, with the key word being yet. But he repeatedly referred to the company’s frustration with the legislation and its fears that users are being put at risk.
He pointed out, for example, that the DMA’s interoperability requirements could allow Meta or another social media company to access the Wi-Fi login details of an iOS user, and thereby build a highly tailored user profile without permission. “This is a vulnerability that threatens privacy,” Andeer said, adding that Apple had raised the issue with the EU, but that “they seem to be ignoring it.”
Despite Apple’s displeasure, the EU currently appears highly unlikely to kill the DMA. The company has had better luck in its home country; however, only last week we reported on its success lobbying to death a similar bill in California in “little more than a month.”
