Apple is taking action against one of its former employees for sharing trade secrets with a new employer. Apple’s lawsuit Chen Shi, a former employee who worked at Oppo as part of the Apple Watch team, was named as a defendant and alleged that they “conspired to steal Apple’s trade secrets.”
According to the indictment, Shi worked as a sensor system architect for the Apple Watch from January 2020 to June 2025, but applied for employment with Oppo as early as April 2025. Apple said the former employee did not disclose that he was moving to Oppo, but that he was returning to China to care for his elderly parents and had no plans to find a new job. But according to the lawsuit, Shi organized and attended “dozens of one-on-one meetings” with members of the Apple Watch team to learn more about their work with “optical sensors, temperature sensors, and EKG sensors.”
The suit alleges that Shi downloaded 63 files from one of Apple’s protected folders and transferred the material to a USB drive before searching the Internet for “How to erase a MacBook” and “Can someone see if I have a file open on a shared drive?” research. In addition to these claims, Apple claimed in the lawsuit that Shi sent a message to his potential employers at Oppo that he would “collect as much information as possible” about Apple’s health tracking technology.
Oppo has now issued a statement about this. MacRumors about Apple’s lawsuit, which states that “no evidence has been found linking these allegations to the employee’s conduct during his employment with OPPO.” The company’s statement also claims that OPPO “has not misappropriated Apple’s trade secrets.”
This is not the first time Apple has taken legal action against one of its former employees. Earlier this summer, the company sued a designer for stealing trade secrets about Vision Pro and passing them on to his new employer, Snap.