The Bundeskartellamt found Apple held rival apps to a stricter consent standard than its own. The agreed fix, neutral prompts and no double hurdle, applies across almost all of the EU.

Apple has agreed to overhaul the way its iPhones ask people for permission to be tracked, after Germany’s competition regulator concluded that the company had written the rules to suit itself.

The Bundeskartellamt said on Monday that it was closing a long-running investigation into App Tracking Transparency, the “Ask App Not to Track” system Apple introduced in 2021, in return for a set of binding changes that will apply across almost all of the European Union.

The watchdog’s objection was not to privacy prompts as such, but to who was made to show them.

Its investigators found that Apple held third-party apps to a stricter consent standard than it applied to its own services, a textbook self-preferencing complaint: the house that sets the rules also plays the game, and had tilted the pitch in its own favour.

It is the same instinct European regulators have pursued in case after case, including the one in which Apple lost its court challenge to gatekeeper status under the Digital Markets Act.

Under the agreed remedy, the consent pop-ups shown to outside developers must become “visually and linguistically neutral”, stripped of the discouraging wording and symbols the regulator said nudged users towards refusing.

Developers will also be allowed to combine Apple’s mandatory tracking request with their own data-protection prompt, rather than putting users through two separate hurdles that Apple’s own apps could quietly sidestep.

The commitments come with unusually long teeth. Apple has four months from the formal decision to make the changes, and the arrangement will be policed for seven years by an independent trustee, a lengthy leash even for a regulator that has made Big Tech something of a speciality.

The German authority has been among the most assertive in Europe in testing the limits of platform power, and it structured this settlement to keep watching well after the headlines fade.

Apple has long defended App Tracking Transparency as a pro-privacy feature that hands users control over their own data, and it is genuinely popular with the public, if not with the advertising and publishing industries it hit hardest.

Its critics counter that a tool which throttles rivals’ access to tracking data while leaving Apple’s own fast-growing advertising business comparatively unencumbered is as much a commercial instrument as a privacy one.

The prompt reshaped the mobile-advertising economy when it arrived, wiping billions from the targeting revenues of ad-funded apps and handing a structural advantage to any player that could still see its own users clearly.

Both things can be true at the same time, which is precisely what makes the case awkward.

Germany is not the first to reach that conclusion. France’s competition authority fined Apple €150m over the same framework, and Italy’s regulator imposed a €98.6m penalty, though Berlin has opted for behavioural remedies rather than a headline fine.

That fits a broader pattern in which Europe has repeatedly reached for its chequebook and its rulebook to prise open Apple’s tightly held ecosystem.

The decision lands amid a wider reckoning with that control, from the App Store fees the European Commission has charged as anti-competitive to the running fight over third-party stores and sideloading.

The throughline is a regulator’s suspicion that Apple’s stated reasons, privacy, security, a clean user experience, keep aligning a little too neatly with its commercial interests.

For users, the visible change will be subtle: a tracking prompt that looks and reads the same whoever is doing the asking.

For Apple, it is another concession in a market where it can no longer set every rule unchallenged, and another sign that Europe intends to treat “privacy” and “competition” as questions to be answered together rather than traded off one against the other. The seven-year trustee will be there to see which of the two wins whenever they collide.

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