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- ⌚ Why Samsung paid $11.6 million for apps it didn't make
⌚ Why Samsung paid $11.6 million for apps it didn't make
Ahad Rahim & Idin Sabahipour
September 02, 2026
Contents
If you take just one thing from this email...
Samsung has been ordered to pay Swatch $11.6 million because apps in its Galaxy App Store copied Swatch's watch faces – even though outside developers (not Samsung) made them.
Samsung argued it was just the store the apps were sold in, but the court looked at what it actually did. Samsung built the tools the developers used, reviewed every app before it went live, decided how each one was promoted, and took a cut of the sales.
A platform can't call itself a neutral middleman while being so in control – and that’s why Samsung’s defence failed.
FEATURED REPORT 📰
⌚ Why Samsung paid $11.6 million for apps it didn't make
What’s going on here?
Last week, the High Court of England and Wales ordered Samsung (the South Korean electronics company) to pay the Swatch Group (the Swiss watchmaker behind Omega, Longines and Tissot) $11.6 million in damages.
Why did Samsung have to pay Swatch damages?
Samsung runs the Galaxy App Store, where people can download apps for Samsung devices.
Between October 2015 and February 2019, apps containing digital copies of Swatch watch faces – the designs shown on a watch dial – were listed in Samsung’s store. Other developers made them, and Samsung let them onto its store, where they were downloaded around 160,000 times.
Swatch sued Samsung for using its protected brand names and logos without permission. In 2022, the High Court agreed that Samsung was responsible and found it liable for trade mark infringement.
🤔 What’s a trade mark?
A trade mark is a sign that tells customers where a product comes from – a name, a logo, a colour, even a sound. For example, think of the Nike swoosh.
If you register it, the Trade Marks Act 1994 lets you stop anyone using the same or a similar sign without permission. If you haven’t registered it, you may still be protected by passing off – but you have to prove three things: that customers already trusted the name (lawyers call this “goodwill”), that customers were misled, and that it cost you.
Swatch relied on 23 registered trade marks (here’s an example of one) and dropped its passing-off claim at trial.
Most of Swatch’s marks were EU trade marks and the conduct happened before Brexit, so most of the claim was brought under Article 9 of the EU Trade Mark Regulation. The court said the UK equivalent – s.10 Trade Marks Act 1994 – used the same tests, and could be applied to this case.
Under those rules, Swatch had to clear four hurdles to show that the apps infringed its trade marks.
📜 Swatch had protected trade marks covering the right territory. Its registrations covered the EU and the UK, which is where the apps were downloaded.
🪞 The apps used signs that were identical or similar to Swatch’s marks. The court compared each app with Swatch’s registrations. One app called “Tissot Navigator 3000” used the protected words “TISSOT NAVIGATOR”, while others showed the names and logos of Swatch-owned luxury brands like Breguet and Glashütte Original on the watch face itself.
⌚ The signs were used for identical or similar products. Swatch’s registrations covered both traditional watches and smartwatches. A branded watch face running on a Samsung smartwatch counts as use on a smartwatch, and a watch-face app is close enough to a real watch to count as a similar product.
🧠 The use caused the kind of harm covered by trade mark law. Because the apps appeared in Samsung’s official store, the court found that people could assume Swatch had approved or licensed them. It also found that the three most downloaded apps damaged or took unfair advantage of Swatch’s reputation.
So the apps crossed the infringement line, but the harder question was why Samsung had to answer for them when other people had made them.
Why was Samsung liable for apps made by somebody else?
Other developers had made the apps, not Samsung.
Samsung said it was simply providing the online store where those developers could offer their work. In short, Samsung was relying on the hosting defence.
🤔 What is the hosting defence?
The hosting defence, set out in regulation 19 of the Electronic Commerce (EC Directive) Regulations 2002, is a legal protection for online services that store content supplied by their users. It can protect the service from having to pay damages when that content breaks the law.
For example, imagine a noticeboard in a café. The café doesn’t automatically become responsible for every unlawful notice pinned up by a customer. In the same way, an app store or social-media platform is not automatically responsible for everything its users upload.
However, the platform must not know that the particular content is unlawful. Once it learns about the unlawful content, it must remove or block it quickly.
So the court looked at several factors to decide whether Samsung was merely storing the apps, or actively controlling what appeared in its store.
Questions | What Samsung did |
|---|---|
🧑💻 Who created the content? | ❌ Other developers made the apps, not Samsung. |
🔍 Was it checked before publication? | ✅ Every app had to pass Samsung’s technical and content reviews before appearing in the store. |
🎛️ Who controlled availability? | ✅ Samsung could decide which devices carried an app, where it appeared, how it was promoted and whether it should be removed. |
💼 How did it support the business? | ✅ Samsung promoted the watch faces to make its smartwatches more attractive, supported customers and took between 20% and 30% of paid-app revenue. |
👀 What did the host know? | ✅ Samsung’s reviewers saw each app’s name and the screenshots the developer supplied, which showed the branding on the watch face. |
The court found Samsung was actively controlling how the apps reached customers. Its review process also meant that it had seen enough to spot the infringement. So, the hosting defence failed, and Samsung was liable for its role in distributing the infringing apps.
Why was it so hard to calculate the damages figure?
The infringing apps generated only $1,002.77 (about £740) in revenue.
Under s.14(2) Trade Marks Act 1994, Swatch could have asked for an account of profits – Samsung handing over what it made from the apps. But a share of roughly $1,000 was worth almost nothing, and it didn’t measure the harm Swatch suffered.
Swatch’s brands appeared on Samsung’s store and smartwatches without permission, often free or very cheap. That could make them seem less exclusive and weaken the reputation they’d spent years building – what lawyers call dilution.
So Swatch needed damages worked out another way. There are three broad methods, which come from General Tire v Firestone, a 1975 patent case that applies across intellectual property.
💷 Option 1 – The profit Swatch lost because customers bought something else. There was no evidence that anyone downloaded a watch-face app instead of buying a Swatch Group watch, so this went nowhere.
📑 Option 2 – The licence fee Swatch normally charges other companies. Swatch doesn’t license its brands to anyone outside the group, so there wasn’t a “going rate” for them to apply.
🤝 Option 3 – The price Samsung would have paid if it had asked first. Because the first two methods didn’t work, the court imagined the two sides negotiating a licence before the infringement and estimated what they’d have agreed. These are called negotiating damages, and this was the method used here.
That final route sounds imaginary because it is.
But the judge couldn’t just guess at this. The parties produced evidence about the apps’ 160,000 downloads, the prices and sales of Samsung smartwatches, Swatch’s refusal to license its brands and other commercial deals involving valuable designs.
Two valuation experts also gave completely different answers. Swatch’s expert proposed about $170 million, while Samsung’s expert proposed just $301 (yes, really).
Once you consider Samsung’s appeal against the 2022 ruling, and a separate (very evidence-heavy) damages trial in June 2026, you can see why the final number took four years to arrive.
How did the judge actually reach $11.6 million?
The judge considered what permission Samsung would have needed, and how much Swatch would have charged for it.
That permission was split into two parts.
Where the trade mark appeared | What Samsung needed permission for | Price |
|---|---|---|
🕰️ On a downloaded watch face | Displaying Swatch’s trade marks on a Samsung smartwatch | $10 per download |
🗂️ In the app-store listing | Displaying and promoting the trade marks in Samsung’s official store (whether or not anyone downloaded the app) | $10 million |
The store listing received a much larger price because the trade marks were visible to everyone browsing, whether or not they downloaded anything – and offering valuable watch brands for nothing made them seem less exclusive.
A trade mark on a watch face was only seen after a download, and the judge thought a high-quality Samsung smartwatch was a less damaging place for it to appear.
The calculation was then simple.
160,000 downloads × $10 = $1.6 million
$1.6 million + $10 million store fee = $11.6 million
The judge added that the figure was high enough to make app stores like Apple’s and Google’s take other people’s trade marks seriously, without making their businesses uneconomic.
Samsung has said it is considering an appeal.
Which law firms were involved?
WilmerHale advised the Swatch Group at the 2022 liability trial and the 2023 appeal. Allen & Overy (now A&O Shearman) advised Samsung at both stages.
The firms changed for the 2026 damages trial. Stephenson Harwood advised the Swatch Group, while White & Case and Bristows advised Samsung.
How can you use this in your applications?
Here are some ways you can use the insights from this story in your law firm applications.
Insight | How to use it in your applications |
|---|---|
In trade mark law, the infringer’s profit is not the same as the brand’s loss | The apps made only $1,002.77, but Swatch’s loss wasn’t $1,000. Its brands were shown on Samsung’s official store for free, which makes them feel less exclusive.
If an application or interview asks why IP interests you, this gives you something concrete to talk about. Mention how a brand’s value lives in its reputation (which isn’t always reflected in the infringer’s sales).
You could explain that IP lawyers protect who gets to use a brand, where it appears and what it sits next to – and point to Swatch as what happens when that control slips. |
Damages can be harder to decide than liability | Samsung was found liable in 2022, but the damages weren’t decided until 2026. One expert said $170 million, and the other said $301. The court had to work out what the two sides would have agreed in a negotiation that never happened.
This is useful if you’re asked about disputes work, or why you’d enjoy it. Most students focus on who wins – but quantifying it in terms of money is where evidence, expert reports and argument all come together.
You could say a case like this showed you that, and that testing competing assumptions and arguing what a client should pay or receive is a part of disputes work that appeals to you. |
IN OTHER NEWS 🗞
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☎️ Commercial law firms are teaching their juniors how to use a phone. Mandatory training has been introduced by Addleshaw Goddard, covering phone calls, professional etiquette and working with older colleagues, and Winston Taylor requires telephone training for its juniors too. The firms say many young lawyers arrive with little experience of a professional environment.
📱 Meta will pay up to $17 billion to settle claims that it built Instagram and Facebook to be addictive for children. The settlement with US states landed midway through a trial in California, where Meta faced claims of up to $200 billion. Meta also agreed to big safety changes for under-18s – a default two-hour daily limit, a midnight-to-6am block and no visible like counts. Covington & Burling defended Meta, while the states were represented in-house by their attorneys general.
OPEN TABS 🌐
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STUFF THAT MIGHT HELP YOU 👌
💻️ Free application advice: Check out my YouTube channel for actionable tips and an insight into the lifestyle of a commercial lawyer in London.
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