Italy's competition authority, citing the EU's Digital Markets Act, says iOS lets iCloud perform full device backups through pathways Apple has blocked for Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and other third party consumer clouds. Apple had not commented at time of publication.
The fight over who can back up your iPhone has a new front. Italy's antitrust authority, AGCM, opened a probe into Apple this week alleging that iOS gives iCloud a native pathway for full device backups while denying the same pathway to rival consumer cloud services, a self-preferencing advantage the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) was built to forbid, Reuters reported via Engadget.
In practice, that means a user who wants to back up an iPhone to Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive cannot get a true full-device backup through the operating system. iCloud can, because Apple engineered iOS to let it. Third-party apps cannot reach the same iOS and iPadOS features, even when the user asks. AGCM's allegation is that this is not a technical accident but a structural preference for Apple's own storage product, and that it falls inside the DMA's gatekeeper rules on interoperability and anti-self-preferencing.
The DMA lets the European Commission designate large platforms as gatekeepers and require them to open specific features and access points to rivals. National authorities like Italy's AGCM investigate complaints and refer findings to the Commission, which can impose fines or design remedies. Italy is not fining Apple on its own; the file lands in Brussels, and the Commission decides what, if anything, Apple must change. The complaint itself is a preliminary step, and AGCM has not issued a finding.
The mechanism in the complaint is narrow but everyday. A full iPhone backup is more than a folder of photos: it is the device's messages, app data, settings, and health records, written and restored as a coherent snapshot. iCloud performs that job natively inside iOS. Google Drive and OneDrive, the named comparators in AGCM's framing, are general-purpose cloud drives that cannot perform that snapshot-style backup through Apple's own operating system. Apple's argument, when the company does address DMA frictions, has been privacy and security: it says opening the same pathway to third parties would risk exposing the deepest layer of a user's device data. The same line is the one Apple's software chief Craig Federighi used to justify a recent delay of Siri's AI features in Europe, attributing the holdup to EU regulatory uncertainty.
That privacy framing is now the live tension in this probe. AGCM's allegation is essentially that the privacy argument is being used to lock in a commercial advantage. If the Commission ultimately agrees, the remedy could be structural: it could force Apple to expose the full-backup pathway to rival cloud providers under technical and contractual conditions Apple considers acceptable. For an EU user, the practical effect would be a setting that today does not exist, namely the ability to back up an iPhone to Google Drive with messages and app data included.
Italy's move also fits a pattern. National authorities in the EU have become the front line of DMA enforcement, each one capable of opening a file that Brussels has to resolve. The Commission's DMA docket has grown steadily since the rules took effect, and Italy has been among the more active national referrers. Apple's stack of EU frictions now includes DMA-driven App Store changes, the delayed Siri features, and a separate dispute over geolocation prompts that Italy pushed earlier this year. iCloud joins that list as the storage and backup front.
What to watch: whether Apple responds in detail before AGCM's preliminary findings are due, whether the Commission opens its own parallel file or waits for Italy's referral, and whether any remedy reaches the full-backup pathway or stops at a narrower access point. The probe is opening-stage, and no outcome is set.