ATT Collective Action Limited filed the claim at the Competition Appeal Tribunal in London on September 3, seeking approval to represent an estimated 13,000 UK developers. The action alleges Apple abused a dominant position by imposing stricter consent requirements on third-party apps than on its own services, reducing advertising income and increasing customer-acquisition costs.
The proposed class representative is Ann Pope, a former senior director for antitrust at the Competition and Markets Authority. The claim estimates losses of about £2 billion between April 2021 and September 2026 for developers that earned advertising revenue through third-party iOS apps or spent money advertising such apps.
Because the case is being brought under Britain’s opt-out collective proceedings regime, eligible developers would be included automatically if the tribunal certifies the action, unless they choose to leave the class. Certification is therefore an important procedural step before the substantive allegations can proceed collectively.
Apple rejects the accusations. The company says privacy is a fundamental human right and that ATT was created to give users a simple way to decide whether apps may track their activity across other companies’ apps and websites. Apple has also said it is bound by the same ATT requirements as developers and will defend the privacy protections.
The dispute centres on how ATT operates alongside data-protection requirements. Introduced with iOS 14.5 on April 26, 2021, ATT requires apps seeking to track users across services owned by other companies to display an Apple-designed permission prompt. If permission is refused, developers lose access to the device’s Identifier for Advertisers and cannot use alternative methods to track that user for the purposes covered by Apple’s rules.
The claimants argue that third-party developers effectively had to obtain consent required under data-protection law and then secure separate permission through Apple’s ATT prompt. Apple’s own services, they contend, were not subjected to the framework in the same way and used a different process for personalised advertising. The lawsuit says this disparity lowered consent rates for outside developers and weakened their ability to monetise advertising or measure campaigns.
Pope said privacy protections should be applied fairly so businesses of all sizes can compete on equal terms. She said the action was intended to protect businesses dependent on Apple’s platform and seek compensation for losses they allegedly suffered.
The case adds to regulatory scrutiny of ATT in Europe. France’s competition authority fined Apple €150 million in March 2025 after finding that the framework’s privacy objective was legitimate but its implementation between April 2021 and July 2023 was neither necessary nor proportionate. The authority said multiple consent windows made third-party apps more cumbersome to use and particularly disadvantaged smaller publishers dependent on advertising.
Italy’s competition authority followed in December 2025 with a €98.6 million penalty after concluding that Apple had abused a dominant position by imposing unfair consent conditions on third-party iOS developers. Its investigation found that Apple’s ATT prompt did not itself satisfy the consent requirements imposed on developers by privacy law, forcing them to seek permission through an additional prompt.
Germany’s Bundeskartellamt had also raised concerns that the framework could favour Apple’s own offerings. Its preliminary assessment said the strict ATT requirements applied to third-party providers but not in equivalent form to Apple, potentially breaching competition rules. Apple later agreed to changes intended to make consent wording and presentation more neutral for competing apps.
The UK claim does not challenge the principle of giving users greater control over tracking. Its case instead focuses on whether Apple’s implementation of that principle discriminated against developers relying on the App Store while benefiting Apple’s own advertising ecosystem.
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