Apple is facing a third App Tracking Transparency lawsuit in the UK, and this one comes with an unusual claim: that Apple held outside app developers to a stricter version of its own privacy rule than it applied to itself.
What the App Tracking Transparency lawsuit claims
App Tracking Transparency has required, since 2021, that every app ask a user’s explicit permission before tracking them across other apps and websites for advertising purposes. Most users say no, which is precisely the point: opt-in rates for cross-app tracking prompts have stayed low industry-wide, cutting into the ad revenue that free apps depend on. The new claim argues Apple did not apply that same bar to its own advertising and first-party services, giving its App Store and other in-house apps access to tracking-adjacent data that third-party developers were blocked from collecting under ATT.
For a developer whose app is monetised through targeted advertising, that consent prompt is the difference between an ad exchange that can still recognise a returning user and one that cannot. Engadget reports the lawsuit’s core argument is that this policy was stricter on third-party developers than on Apple itself, which is the twist in a framework Apple has always presented as evenhanded: one set of rules for everyone, enforced by the operating system rather than by policy alone.
Reconciling the damages figures
The action is a class claim brought on behalf of UK app publishers and developers who say their advertising income suffered because of the asymmetry. GamesIndustry.biz reported the claim’s value at £2 billion; Engadget put the same case at $2.7 billion. By our arithmetic, those are not competing figures: £2 billion converts to almost exactly $2.7 billion at prevailing exchange rates, so the two numbers describe the same lawsuit rather than a discrepancy in reporting.
This is the third UK legal challenge to ATT specifically, on top of the antitrust scrutiny Apple already faces elsewhere over how it runs its platform. 9to5Mac’s report notes that Apple issued a response after publication, though the substance of that reply has not been detailed in the coverage we have seen. Until Apple’s own account of the tracking-data question becomes public, the stricter-for-developers-than-for-itself claim remains an allegation to be tested in court, not an established fact.
A widening pattern of platform-rule disputes
We covered Apple’s new EU App Store fee tiers on 18 August, when Epic Games responded by taking the arrangement back to court. That case is about the commission Apple charges on external payment links, a different rule to ATT’s tracking consent. But the two disputes share a shape: Apple sets a platform rule, a party affected by it argues the rule favours Apple’s own business, and the fight ends up in front of a court rather than a regulator. The ATT claim adds a jurisdiction, the UK, to a list of legal fronts that already includes the EU.
The near-term question is whether this claim gets certified as a class action at all, and what Apple says in its formal defence once that response is filed in full. A ruling that ATT’s own enforcement discriminated against third parties would be a harder problem for Apple than the fee disputes it is fighting in Europe, since it would touch the privacy framework Apple has spent five years using as a selling point.
