- Tuta Mail filed a DMA complaint against Apple on April 2, 2025, for not enabling tuta among predetermined mail applications in iOS
- The encrypted email provider issued the complaint after allegedly wait for months for a response from the great technology firm
- The complaint retired less than 24 hours later, since Apple finally contacted the developers of Tuta
Tuta Mail, an encrypted email service, filed a complaint against Apple on Wednesday, April 2, 2025. However, the action has been withdrawn after less than 24 hours.
The German Safe Email Provider decided to file a formal complaint against Apple for not enabling its service among predetermined mail applications in iOS as required by the digital market law. Tuta did it after allegedly waiting for a response to your application for months.
However, “after a journalist contacted Apple on the subject, Apple contacted us in a matter of hours,” wrote the Tuta CEO, Matthias Pfau, on April 3 in an official announcement. “For this reason, we will withdraw the complaint to the EU, and Apple doesn’t have to fear any consequence.”
Why did Tuta issue the complaint?
The digital market law, which entered into force last year, has introduced new obligations for large technological companies to prevent them from abusing their dominant position in the market.
For Apple, this means, among other things, to give all those who use an iPhone or iPad the option to choose a third -party service such as its default email application.
To allow their users to do this, the application developers must follow the company’s guidelines and send a formal application. It was said that Tuta Mail did it on January 14, 2025, but there was no response.
The team tried to contact Apple by email and X publications during March without much success.
Apple launched predetermined mail applications with the launch of iOS 14 in 2020, four years before DMA rules went into force. The largest competitors of Apple, Gmail and the popular protonmail encryption service are among developers who have been successfully enabled as predetermined mail applications since then.
Estimated @apple @tim_cook we would like our users to choose Tuta Mail as the predetermined mail application in #ioswe’t -Plee Apple Devs as requested two months ago, sent a reminder, but so far, silence. Could you connect with the right people? #DafaultMAILApp #Apple.March 18, 2025
On April 2, Tuta decided to file a formal DMA complaint against Apple for, as PFAU said, “abusing his control position against us.”
Less than 24 hours later, Tuta confirmed to Techradar that Apple finally contacted the team “after a reuters journalist wanted to get to the back of the matter with Apple,” Tuta’s press officer Hanna Bozakov told us.
However, this was enough for Tuta to decide to withdraw his complaint against the great technological giant.
“The main problem here is that Apple will get yours. We will withdraw the complaint because it makes no sense to keep it, but next time, Apple can act exactly in the same way,” said Bozakov.
“We would like to see the big technology companies use their market power in a responsible way, behave correctly and fairly and not only take measures when they are threatened with bad advertising.”
Apple response
Techradar approached Apple to comment, and the company told us that Tuta’s request was incomplete since he lacked the “mailt.” This is a URL scheme that is needed for the correct function of predetermined mail applications in iOS.
Apple also told Techradar that the company contacted Tuta developers as quickly as possible to help them solve the problem.
Bozakov confirmed the error, but said the team was informed only today (April 3) about this. “I am quite sure that we would still be waiting for an answer if the journalist did not contact them,” he added.
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