Apple settles lawsuit with developer over App Store rejections and scams

guest · Sep 3, 2022

By Sarah Perez @sarahintampa - September 1, 2022

An app developer’s lawsuit over App Store rejections, scams and fraud has ended in a settlement agreement after court filings show a request to dismiss the suit earlier this summer. The plaintiff, app developer and former Pinterest engineer Kosta Eleftheriou, made a name for himself in recent months calling out some of the most egregious App Store scams.

This later culminated in a lawsuit of his own against Apple, filed in California’s Superior Court in Santa Clara County in March 2021, where he alleged his own app had been unfairly rejected from the App Store and then later targeted by scammers, leading to lost revenues.
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The case had been a high-profile example of developer discontent with Apple’s App Store business. Many developers have become dissatisfied not only with the requirement to pay Apple commissions on their own sales — something Epic Games is suing over currently — but also the how the App Store model itself incentivizes scammers to rip off and profit from legitimate developers’ work. But few take these matters court, as Eleftheriou had done.
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His complaint alleged that not only had Apple rejected his FlickType Apple Watch keyboard app from the App Store, it then approved competitor keyboard apps and others that used an integrated version of FlickType keyboard to publish to the App Store. This seemingly contradicted Apple’s claim that the FlickType keyboard offered a “poor user experience,” given that Apple’s own app review team was greenlighting the same technology when integrated into other apps like Nano for Reddit, Chirp for Twitter, WatchChat for WhatsApp and Lens for Instagram.
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Following the filing of the case last year, the two parties participated in court calls with a judge, the court docket shows, including as recently as this spring. A request for dismissal of the lawsuit was subsequently filed on July 21, 2022, after Apple and Kpaw (Eleftheriou’s business) came to an agreement.

However, it’s hard to imagine the developer would have agreed to dismiss the case if terms were not at least somewhat agreeable, given his ongoing criticism of Apple’s App Store business and the hardships developers face.
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Apple settles lawsuit with developer over App Store rejections and scams

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