UK Competitions and Market Authority is shutting down its Apple investigation

The organisation says it was closing it down “on the grounds of administrative priority”

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is shutting down its investigation into Apple’s in-app payment system.

In a statement, the CMA confirmed that while the closure of the investigation “does not constitute a decision by the CMA”, it was closing the case “on the grounds of administrative priority.”

“The CMA will continue to monitor Apple’s conduct in the market,” the statement confirmed.

“[This] decision to close the case on grounds of administrative priority does not prevent, pre-judge or fetter the CMA’s ability, if appropriate, to open an investigation under the Chapter II prohibition in future, or to take action in respect of the conduct considered as part of the investigation.”

It further noted that as this was a “fast-moving” case and any action could “potentially take a significant period of time”, it’d decided to shutter the case following an internal review.

The European Commission began investigating Apple in March to identify whether its new business terms violated the DMA. Its preliminary findings, released in June, did find that Apple was in breach of the new regulations, and “identified a number of potential harms from Apple’s requirements on certain developers to use their proprietary payment system to process in-app purchases for digital content, which could be avoided if app developers were able to choose their own payments service providers and transact directly with users.”

Apple recently updated its business terms in the EU to allow developers to link to external payment systems or promote offers from other platforms that do not use the built-in iOS payment system.