Apple sure has had a rough 2025

It’s been a rough start to 2025 for the world’s most valuable company.

Apple now faces three huge headwinds against its business: President Trump’s tariffs and whatever impact those might have on shipments from Asia; the possibility that it could lose its lucrative deal with Google to serve as the default search engine; and a court ruling on Wednesday evening that blew up its control of the App Store.

Any of these could hit Apple’s bottom line hard, but combined, they could be a brutal blow to a company investors have, until this year anyway, flocked to for its stability.

Here’s what’s going on.

Apple stock had its biggest drop in five years on April 3rd after Trump announced his sweeping tariff plan. Shares have recovered a bit as those taxes have… remained unclear. But they’ll likely impact product sales or eat into Apple’s famous profit margins.

We may not have to wait too long for the first insight into the company’s thinking.

Apple’s set to report its fiscal second-quarter earnings after markets close on Thursday, when we’ll hear from CEO Tim Cook and the company’s new chief financial officer Kevan Parekh, about how Trump’s tariffs could impact the company’s hardware business. Long story short: the taxes could mean higher prices for goods and dampen demand for iPhones, Macs, and iPads.

I say could because nobody knows for sure. First, the Trump administration was set to impose 54 percent tariffs on China (and others on India and Vietnam). Then it bumped ‘em up to a cumulative 104 percent, and then it bumped them even more to a grand total of 145 percent. But then it gave Apple a reprieve and said electronics fall under separate semiconductor taxes coming in May or June.

We don’t know how high those will be yet. Apple reportedly shipped 600 tons of iPhones from India to the US in hopes of getting ahead of their impact.

Smart move, given that’s the company’s largest business line, but that may only tide it over so long. New iPhones usually launch in September.

Billions at stake from Google

Then there’s the software side of the business. And that’s facing two speed bumps. Let’s talk about the first.

We’re currently in the remedies stage of Google’s search antitrust trial after judge Amit Mehta ruled last year that Google has a monopoly in search and advertising. One piece of information that surfaced back in May: Google paid Apple $20 billion in 2022 to be the default search engine in Safari, reportedly up from $18 billion in 2021.

That revenue, about 5 percent of Apple’s net sales in 2022, is under scrutiny right now. The US Department of Justice wants Google to do several things to end its monopoly. It really wants Google to sell Chrome, for example. But it also hopes to stop Google from paying its way to the default search engine in places like Safari.

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was asked about the arrangement on Wednesday, and according to my colleague David Pierce, who was in the room, argued that Google should be allowed to pay for that right, so long as it isn’t exclusive.

Judge Mehta gets to make the $20 billion+ decision.

The Wednesday night whammy

Meanwhile, another judge just blew a hole in the App Store.

Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers of the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled Wednesday evening that, effective immediately, Apple can no longer charge fees on any purchases made outside the App Store.

Rogers accused the company and an executive of lying under oath and found that Apple had “willfully” failed to comply with her order and instead chose to “maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.”

The court said that Apple made it harder and more expensive for developers to link from apps to their own websites for payments.

Developers who charge for things in their apps, like subscriptions or in-game items, now have an incentive to link out of the App Store. The fees are gone, and the court ruled Apple can’t “restrict developers style, formatting, or placement of links for purchases outside an app,” limit “use of buttons or other calls to action,” or plaster any sort of scary message other than they’re “going to a third-party site.”

Apple said it will fight the ruling. “We strongly disagree with the decision. We will comply with the court’s order and we will appeal,” Apple senior director of corporate communications Olivia Dalton told noti.group.

Look, I’m not saying Apple’s dead in the water here. It’s still a titan, and Cook is a supply chain wizard. There’s probably no better person to be at the helm as the company faces tariffs. I just can’t think of a tougher start the year for Apple in recent memory. Add it all up, and by the end of 2025, you have new costs from tariffs and potentially massively reduced revenues from regulators. The company needs to build something new that can go past the iPhone and all of the revenue from developers it’s brought in, and it probably needs to do it sooner rather than later.