Apple has told the EU that Apple Maps and Ads do not qualify for the gatekeeper designation.
The European Commission is considering whether to designate Apple’s Maps and Ads services as gatekeepers under its Digital Markets Act (DMA). Apple, however, does not think they qualify.
The DMA rules and gatekeeper designation apply to companies operating core platform services such as search engines and app stores that provide these services to a significant portion of the market.
To receive this designation, these services also need to play an important “gateway” role between business and consumers, and have a strong, lasting position in the market.
The Commission said that it received information from Apple indicating that the services meet the DMA thresholds. However, the Commission now has 45 days to decide whether to go ahead with the designation or not.
If it does, Apple Maps and Apple Ads will have six months to comply and will be under high EU scrutiny around things such as interoperability, transparency and potentially self-favouring practices.
Apple told SiliconRepublic.com that its Maps service has very limited usage in the EU when compared to rival services Google Maps and Waze.
Meanwhile Apple Ads, it claimed, is also smaller than competing services provided by Google, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and X.
Rival services Google Maps and Google Ads are already designated as gatekeepers, while Apple’s App Store, Safari browser and iOS operating system have also been deemed gatekeepers.
The company has already been fined €500m under the DMA – the first, alongside Meta, to receive a penalty under the legislation. These penalties concerned Apple’s rules around its web browser, App Store and default settings.
The EU generally designates a gatekeeper position to services that have 45m monthly active end users and 10,000 yearly business users.
However, the Commission has been considering some changes to this. Earlier this month, it launched an investigation to assess whether to designate Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as gatekeepers despite them not meeting the thresholds for size, user number and market position under the DMA.
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Updated, 2:40pm, 28 November 2025: This article was updated to remove a sentence wrongly attributed to an Apple statement.
