Last year, the AGCM found that Apple abused its market dominance with its treatment of third-party developers.

Months after being hit with a nearly €100m penalty, Apple is once again under investigation by the Italian competition authority – this time over concerns around its interoperability obligations under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA).

The Autorita Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM)’s second probe into Apple concerns iOS and iPadOS, which it said might be unfairly treating third-party cloud providers.

According to the DMA, companies with the gatekeeper designation must ensure that third-party sellers receive the same free and effective interoperability with their operating systems as the company’s own services.

The Italian authority pointed to “indications” of an apparent lack of access third-party cloud providers have to the same features that are available to Apple’s own iCloud. The global technology giant holds more than 40pc of the mobile operating system market share in Europe.

“For example, it appears that Apple does not allow alternative cloud storage services to use the iOS and iPadOS features enabling end users to perform a full backup of their devices’ data, while those same features are available to Apple’s iCloud,” the AGCM said in a statement.

This marks the first time the AGCM is running an investigation alongside the European Commission.

Italy’s competition authority hit Apple with a penalty of more than €98.6m last December after finding that the company abused its “super-dominant position” in the app distribution market with its App Store.

The probe stemmed from Apple’s 2021 policy on App Tracking Transparency (ATT) on iOS which forced third-party app developers to double user consent requests for the same purposes. The AGCM concluded that the policy did not comply with the bloc’s privacy requirements.

Apple, at the time, said that it disagreed with the AGCM’s decision and planned to appeal.

This also isn’t Apple’s first encounter with the DMA. Last year, the company – alongside Meta – became the first penalty recipients under the law, with Apple alone receiving a €500m fine for restricting app developers from informing customers of alternative offers outside its App Store.

A few months later, the company introduced changes to its App Store policies to comply with the law, which carries fines of up to 10pc of a company’s total annual worldwide turnover. For Apple, this could be as much as $41.6bn.

Meanwhile, the EU is also considering whether to designate Apple’s Maps and Ads services as gatekeepers under DMA.

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