An app developer’s lawsuit over App Store rejections, scams, and fraud resulted in a settlement agreement. Kosta Eleftheriou, an app developer and former Pinterest engineer, has made a name for himself in recent months by calling out some of the most egregious App Store scams.
This eventually led to his own lawsuit against Apple, which he filed in March 2021 in California’s Superior Court in Santa Clara County, alleging that his own app had been unfairly rejected from the App Store and then targeted by scammers, resulting in lost revenues.
The case was a high-profile example of developer dissatisfaction with Apple’s App Store business model. Not only did Apple reject his FlickType Apple Watch keyboard app from the App Store, but it also approved competitor keyboard apps and others that used an integrated version of FlickType keyboard to publish to the App Store, according to his complaint. This appeared to contradict Apple’s claim that the FlickType keyboard provided a “poor user experience,” given that the same technology was approved by Apple’s own app review team when integrated into other apps such as Nano for Reddit, Chirp for Twitter, WatchChat for WhatsApp, and Lens for Instagram.
