A settlement was reached in a complaint filed by an app developer against Apple’s App Store concerning fraud, scams, and rejections. The most severe App Store scams have been exposed by Kosta Eleftheriou, an app developer and former Pinterest programmer, in recent months.
This ultimately resulted in him filing his own case against Apple in March 2021 in California’s Superior Court in Santa Clara County, claiming that his own programme had been wrongfully rejected from the App Store and then targeted by scammers, causing lost income.
The incident served as a prominent illustration of how developers are unhappy with Apple’s App Store monetization strategy. According to his complaint, Apple not only rejected his FlickType Apple Watch keyboard app from the App Store, but it also let rival keyboard apps and others that made use of an integrated FlickType keyboard published to the App Store. Given that the same technology was endorsed by Apple’s own app review team when incorporated into other apps such as Nano for Reddit, Chirp for Twitter, WatchChat for WhatsApp, and Lens for Instagram, this appeared to contradict Apple’s claim that the FlickType keyboard provided a “poor user experience.”
