An order posted on Saturday tells Apple to hand over financial information to India’s competition regulator. It also tells the regulator not to issue a final ruling before 15 July.
The Delhi High Court told Apple over the weekend to ‘fully cooperate’ with the Competition Commission of India in its ongoing antitrust investigation of the App Store.
In the same order, posted to the court’s website on Saturday, the bench told the CCI not to issue a final ruling before 15 July. The company had asked the court to suspend the investigation entirely while it challenges India’s penalty-calculation rules. It did not get that.
The CCI’s investigation, dating to a 2021 complaint joined by Match Group and several Indian startups, found in 2024 that Apple had abused its dominant position in the iPhone apps market by requiring developers to use its proprietary in-app payment system.
The regulator has been seeking Apple’s financial information for penalty calculation ever since, and Apple has been refusing because India’s 2024 amendment to the Competition Act, which permits the regulator to impose fines against global rather than domestic turnover, is itself the subject of a separate Apple challenge.
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The Saturday order is the procedural compromise between those two positions. Apple has to hand over what the CCI has asked for; the CCI cannot use those numbers to issue a final order until at least mid-July, which buys Apple’s penalty-law challenge time to move through the courts in parallel.
The final hearing on the substantive question was already set for 21 May, three days from the court’s posting; whether that date holds is now itself in question, with the order’s language pulling the procedural deadline outward.
The number quoted around this case is $38bn, the upper bound if the CCI applied the maximum penalty against the global turnover formula.
Apple has described the figure as the ‘world’s largest’ antitrust fine it could face, and the watchdog has not contested that framing in writing.
Whether the eventual penalty arrives anywhere near it depends on a set of unresolved legal questions, which Saturday’s order has now ensured will not be answered before the summer.
Apple’s India business has been growing faster than almost any other major market. iPhone share is at 9%, up from 4% two years ago, on Counterpoint Research’s measurement, and India now accounts for roughly a quarter of Apple’s global iPhone production after the company assembled about 55 million units there in 2025.
The CCI investigation is unfolding inside the country that is currently Apple’s most important growth market and an increasingly central part of its supply chain.
Apple has accused the CCI of exceeding its powers by pushing for financials before the underlying penalty-calculation law is settled. The CCI has accused Apple of running out the clock.
The Delhi High Court has, by ordering cooperation but blocking a final ruling, declined to side fully with either characterisation. The court’s calibration here is consistent with what MediaNama’s account of the proceedings has described as a deliberate Indian-judicial reluctance to let the case be either dismissed for procedure or pre-judged on substance.
The parallel that matters most is the European one. The European Commission in April 2025 fined Apple €500m for the same kind of anti-steering restrictions in the App Store. The fine has been appealed, and a layered replacement-fee structure has since been introduced in the EU, including the broader package of Apple changes forced by the Digital Markets Act.
India is now the second major jurisdiction whose competition regulator has concluded, on the substance, that Apple’s payment system rules constitute an abuse of dominant position. The EU’s headline figure was smaller. The Indian penalty arithmetic, by allowing global turnover sizing, has a much higher ceiling.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment. The CCI did not publicly comment on the Saturday order. Between now and 15 July, three things will happen on a visible timeline: Apple’s separate challenge to the penalty-calculation amendment will move through the courts, the CCI will continue collecting the financial information it has been asking for, and the 21 May hearing date will either be reaffirmed or pushed.
The case is not closer to a resolution this week than it was last week. It is, on the order’s own language, closer to a procedural framework inside which a resolution becomes possible.
