Apple faces a £2bn UK claim over App Tracking Transparency, brought by a former CMA official

Apple is facing a £2bn claim in London over the privacy prompt that reshaped mobile advertising. The case, filed at the Competition Appeal Tribunal on behalf of UK app developers, argues that App Tracking Transparency polices everyone except Apple.

The claim was reported by Reuters, which values it at $2.7bn. Bringing it is Ann Pope, a former senior official at the Competition and Markets Authority, which puts an ex-regulator on the other side of the table.

The allegation is about asymmetry rather than privacy itself. Developers say Apple requires them to obtain explicit consent before tracking users across apps, while its own advertising operation gathers comparable data without clearing the same bar.

Pope has framed the action in two parts. The aim is “to ensure that the rules that Apple applies are fair, and to compensate the losses that British companies have suffered,” she said.

Apple’s position has not moved. The company says the framework delivers “important privacy protections” for users, and has not commented further on the claim.

The feature at issue arrived in 2021 and changed the industry quickly. The prompt asking whether an app may track you across other companies’ apps cut the flow of identifiers that mobile advertising had been built on, and the businesses most exposed were the ones buying and selling that data.

The harm developers describe is mostly about measurement. Without a cross-app identifier, an app cannot easily tell which advert produced a paying customer, and an advertiser who cannot attribute a sale ends up paying more to make it.

Apple’s own advertising business grew over the same period. That sequence is what regulators in four European countries have been examining, and it is the sequence the tribunal will now be asked to price.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal runs an opt-out collective regime, meaning a certified class covers every developer who fits the definition unless they actively leave, which is how a claim of this size gets assembled from businesses that would never litigate individually.

Apple has already lost once in that forum. In October last year, the tribunal found the company had abused its dominant position between 2015 and 2020 by overcharging on App Store commissions, in a case worth around £1.5bn brought by the academic Rachael Kent, and Apple is appealing.

Its main rival chose not to find out. Google settled a UK class action over Play Store fees for £260m rather than take a judgment.

Developers have a separate front open too, with a claim over App Store fees already before the tribunal. The new case attacks the advertising layer instead of the commission, which is a different revenue stream and a different theory of harm.

The App Store is under legal pressure on several continents at once. The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear Apple’s appeal against a contempt finding in the Epic case, which turns on commissions rather than tracking but draws on the same argument about control of the platform.

Europe has been building the evidence for it. France’s competition authority fined Apple €150m in 2025 over how the framework was implemented, Italy’s regulator fined the company over it in December, and Poland has an investigation running.

Germany got a remedy rather than a penalty. Apple rewrote its tracking-consent rules to end a self-preferencing probe by the Bundeskartellamt, which is the closest any authority has come to changing the design of the prompt.

None of those findings binds a British tribunal. They do mean the claimants can point at four competition authorities that examined the same conduct and did not simply accept the privacy justification.

Nothing has been decided yet. The claim has to be certified before it proceeds; Apple will contest that stage, and the class definition and the method for calculating developer losses are both still to be argued.