Apple claims an ex-employee stole Apple Watch commerce secrets and techniques for Oppo

Apple goes after one other one in every of its earlier staff for allegedly sharing commerce secrets and techniques with a brand new employer. Apple’s lawsuit listed Chen Shi, a former worker who labored on the Apple Watch crew, together with Oppo, as defendants, claiming they “conspired to steal Apple’s commerce secrets and techniques.”

In response to the lawsuit, Shi labored as a Sensor System Architect for the Apple Watch from January 2020 to June 2025, however was searching for employment with Oppo as early as April 2025. Apple claimed that its former worker did not disclose that he was leaving to hitch Oppo and as a substitute mentioned he was going again to China to take care of his aged dad and mom and did not have any plans to discover a new job. Nonetheless, the lawsuit mentioned that Shi “arrange and attended dozens of one-on-one conferences” with Apple Watch crew members to find out about their work on “optical sensors, temperature sensors, and ECG sensors.”

Within the lawsuit, Shi allegedly downloaded 63 recordsdata from one in every of Apple’s protected folders and transferred the fabric to a USB drive earlier than looking out the web for “the best way to wipe out [a] macbook” and “can someone see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?” Together with these claims, Apple mentioned within the lawsuit that Shi despatched a message to his future Oppo employers that he would “accumulate as a lot data as potential” about Apple’s health-sensing applied sciences.

Oppo has since offered a press release to MacRumors about Apple’s lawsuit, claiming that it has “discovered no proof establishing any connection between these allegations and the worker’s conduct throughout his employment at OPPO.” The corporate assertion additionally mentioned that OPPO has not “misappropriated Apple’s commerce secrets and techniques.”

It is not the primary time that Apple has taken authorized motion towards one in every of its former staff. Earlier this summer time, the corporate sued a design engineer, alleging that he stole trade secrets concerning the Imaginative and prescient Professional and shared them together with his new employer, Snap.