Apple slams EU, warning of new fraud and porn risks on iPhones
A bitter clash between Apple and EU regulators over app store safety has intensified, with the tech giant claiming children are now at risk from harmful content.
Apple has accused the European Commission of forcing it to abandon critical App Store measures that stop children accessing harmful content, including pornography, and protect adults against fraud.
The European Commission forced Apple to make the changes as part of the bloc’s sweeping Digital Markets Act enforcement – and now wants the company to fix it.
The high-stakes clash over consumer safety versus competition is now being closely watched by other regulators, including the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, as they re-examine local technology regulations.
Apple’s extraordinary claims, made in a detailed 15-page letter to top European Union regulators, called the European Commission’s approach an “utterly incoherent” regulatory stance.
The dispute highlights the complex global challenge of balancing digital market reforms with user security, a situation that Apple warns is “potentially transforming how Australians use their Apple devices”.
The letter, sent late last week, and addressed to director-general Roberto Viola and acting director-general Linsey McCallum, comes as the European Commission probes Apple under the separate Digital Services Act over concerns about its measures to mitigate financial scams and protect children. Apple argues it is now being scrutinised for risks the DMA forced it to create.
“It does not make sense for one EU law to encourage Apple to mitigate as much as possible the risk of exposing consumers to fraud or minors to potentially harmful apps through the App Store, only for another EU law to prevent Apple from using those same measures,” Apple vice president Kyle Andeer wrote.
He said the act’s “unintended consequences” are now being felt by users.
At the core of Apple’s complaint is the requirement under the DMA to allow third-party app distribution, or “sideloading”, in the EU. Apple claims the European Commission has “expressly forbidden Apple from conducting the kind of comprehensive review of sideloaded apps” that the company has used for 17 years to keep its platforms safe. This forced change, Apple asserts, is now the central reason for the new DSA safety probes.
During negotiations, Apple said it was compelled to dramatically narrow the scope of its App Review Guidelines — the global rules all developers must follow — to a limited subset of its new “notarisation” process for third-party apps. Apple’s notarisation is a baseline review that applies to all iOS and iPadOS apps, “regardless of their distribution channel”, to ensure security, privacy and device integrity.
Apple said that the notarisation process has now been “cut to only half of the guidelines we use around the world to help ensure our users’ safety”. The company it stopped more than $2bn in potentially fraudulent transactions and blocked nearly 2 million risky app submissions last year. But Apple said Europe’s new laws threatens to undermine these safety measures.
It says it was compelled to eliminate two major categories of consumer protection rules. These include protecting minors from pornography. Apple warned the European Commission that by removing most of its rules on “objectionable content”, it would become “inevitable that hardcore pornography apps and other apps potentially harmful to children would appear on iOS and iPadOS”.
The other category relates to combating financial dark patterns. Apple says it was also forced to drop guidelines that restricted exploitative business models, such as rules requiring personal loan apps to clearly disclose all terms and prohibitions on unapproved financial institutions from offering certain cryptocurrency services.
“There is, of course, a risk that some of these models may prove exploitative — or include dark patterns that manipulate users.”
The European Commission has also required Apple to allow developers to link out of their apps to external payment systems, a change that strips users of the protections of Apple’s in-app purchase system, including its fraud detection and the “Ask to Buy” feature that allows parents to approve their children’s transactions.
Apple also claims the European Commission’s stance on interoperability has introduced new, severe risks. Apple argues it was forced to lift a restriction that prevents “nefarious actors” from using iOS and iPadOS apps to “skim or access other individuals’ sensitive financial information”.
The company said that the European Commission’s “aggressive approach to DMA enforcement has undermined our ability to protect our EU users from harm to the same extent we can elsewhere”. This comes in the broader context of the DMA’s “unintended consequences”, which have also included developers like Meta Platforms demanding “unprecedented access to Apple users’ daily Wi-Fi history” and the complete contents of device notifications, according to a separate report.
Apple is urging the European Commission to use upcoming reviews of the EU’s digital regulatory framework to address the “fundamental differences in approach” between the DMA’s focus on competition and the DSA’s goal of consumer protection.
The escalating dispute is, therefore, a critical indicator for the ACCC, which must weigh the benefits of market competition against the potential for significant consumer harm and the erosion of digital safety standards.
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