Apple has launched a lawsuit against Chinese phone maker Oppo, which is most notable for being behind the OnePlus phone brand. The American tech giant alleges that Oppo poached a member of the Apple Watch team to access trade secrets.
The report from Gizmodo says that the lawsuit is against former Apple system architect Dr. Cheng Shi, Oppo and the California-based Innopeak. Dr. Shi is currently leading a team at Oppo’s U.S. office, developing sensing technology.
Shi worked at Apple from 2020 to June 2025, where he participated in various Apple sensor developments and received confidential information about what Apple is planning to make in the future.
Specifically, the lawsuit accuses Shi of downloading 63 confidential documents to a USB stick three days before leaving Apple. These supposedly include information about products that Apple hasn’t released yet. The lawsuit also says that before Shi downloaded the documents, he searched, “how to wipe out MacBook” and “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?”
The company also says that on Shi’s work phone, there were communications between him and Oppo senior leadership that started in April 2025, before he left Apple in June. One of the quotes from the lawsuit says, “Lately, I’ve also been reviewing various internal materials and doing a lot of 1:1 meetings in an effort to collect as much information as possible – will share with you all later.”
In the month before he left, Dr. Shi scheduled 33 one-on-one meetings, which even covered departments not expressly related to what he worked on. One year earlier, in that same time span, he held seven meetings. He also told coworkers at Apple that he was returning to China to look after his parents and wouldn’t be looking for a new job.
Outside of the watch area, Apple is also worried that he took information related to the company’s custom processors.
Oppo owns a research centre in the U.S. that’s jointly operated under Oppo and Innopeak’s names.
Source: Gizmodo
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