Apple faces a £2bn UK claim over App Tracking Transparency
A £2 billion UK class action accuses Apple of applying its App Tracking Transparency rules to every developer but itself — and UK studios that ran iOS ad campaigns are in the class automatically.
Apple is facing a £2 billion class action in the UK over App Tracking Transparency, the consent prompt it added to iOS in 2021 with version 14.5. UK developers who earned advertising revenue inside third-party iOS apps, or who paid to acquire users, are represented by the claim automatically.
ATT Collective Action Limited filed the case with the Competition Appeal Tribunal, as GamesIndustry.biz reports. Its argument is not that privacy protection is wrong, but that Apple applied the rule to everyone except itself. A third-party app has to obtain consent under data protection law and then clear a second prompt whose wording Apple controls; Apple's own advertising and data collection, the claim says, runs to a looser standard. It also alleges Apple shipped the change without consulting developers, and that the result was a fall in advertising value and a rise in acquisition costs across the UK app sector.
"It was imposed unfairly and unilaterally, without consultation," said Luke Streatfeild, the Hausfeld partner leading the claim.
Fronting the action is Ann Pope, formerly a senior director for antitrust at the Competition and Markets Authority, who has framed it as a question of whether a gatekeeper can write one rulebook for the businesses that depend on it and another for itself.
Apple is under pressure on ATT elsewhere too. Regulators in France, Italy, Germany, Poland and Romania have all investigated the framework. France and Italy have levied fines totalling more than £200 million, and Apple settled with the German regulator in August.
The damage ATT did to small teams was never really about compliance work. It was about attribution. Once you cannot reliably tell which advert brought a player in, paid user acquisition stops being a measurable channel and becomes a bet, and the studios that felt it hardest were the ones with no first-party data and no organic reach to fall back on. Ampere Analysis' Louise Wooldridge has pointed to mature franchises such as Angry Birds, which lean heavily on paid acquisition, as especially exposed.
Whether the tribunal agrees is a different question, and a claim this size will take years to resolve. But UK studios that ran iOS campaigns in the past five years are in the class by default, which is reason enough to know it exists.