Apple has taken a former engineer and Chinese tech giant Oppo to court, alleging one of its own senior team members spent his final days at the company quietly downloading dozens of confidential files and that Oppo knew exactly what was coming.
The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court, targets Chen Shi, a former Sensor System Architect on the Apple Watch team, and accuses him of stealing trade secrets tied to some of Apple’s most sensitive health technology research.
63 Documents, a USB Drive, and a Cover Story
According to the court filing, Shi downloaded at least 63 confidential documents onto a USB drive in the days before he left Apple in June 2025. The files were not routine they allegedly included schematics for ECG sensors, temperature sensing technology, and internal product roadmaps that map out where Apple Watch health features are headed.
To his colleagues, Shi said he was leaving to go back to China to take care of his aging parents. It was a clean, sympathetic exit story. But Apple’s forensic team told a different one.
The Search History That Gave It Away
When Apple’s investigators combed through Shi’s work computer, they found searches that raised immediate red flags including “how to wipe out macbook” and “can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive.” These weren’t the browsing habits of someone wrapping up loose ends before a family move. They pointed, Apple argues, to someone actively trying to cover his tracks.
Shi is now leading a sensing technology team at Oppo’s research center in Silicon Valley a detail Apple says is no coincidence.
The Text That Implicated Oppo
The lawsuit doesn’t stop at Shi. Apple is going after Oppo directly, and the key piece of evidence is a message allegedly recovered from Shi’s work phone. In it, he reportedly told an Oppo executive that he was “collecting as much information as possible” from Apple to share later. The executive’s response, according to the filing, was “alright” and an “OK” emoji.
Apple is citing that exchange as evidence that Oppo wasn’t an innocent bystander, it was in on it.
Oppo has denied the allegations entirely. In a statement, the company said it found no evidence supporting Apple’s claims, that it respects the intellectual property of all companies, and that it welcomes fair judicial proceedings to set the record straight.
Apple Has Been Here Before
This isn’t the first time Apple has found itself in this position. The company recently filed a similar lawsuit against a former engineer accused of walking off with secrets related to the Vision Pro headset. A pattern is emerging and Apple is clearly drawing a hard line.
The stakes are high. The wearable health device market is one of the most competitive spaces in consumer tech, and the sensor technology at the center of this case represents years of research and development. For Apple, this isn’t just about one engineer and one USB drive. It’s about sending a message that the cost of taking that walk out the door with company secrets will follow you all the way to court.
