Apple Settles FlickType Lawsuit
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.
[…]
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.
Neither side is saying what they agreed to.
Previously:
- FlickType Lawsuit Allowed to Proceed
- FlickType Sherlock+’d
- FlickType Discontinued
- The App Store Isn’t Catching the Most Egregious Scams
- FlickType Developer Sues Apple
- Scammy KeyWatch and Trezor Apps
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
For all the noise he's made about Apple being terrible and evil and all the scams he has trumpeted, he isn't willing to make his own settlement public? I get that part of that would be Apple pushing him to NDA it. But he either stands on his principles and says no, in which case he either has to continue the case, or he folds and makes himself look like he's only upset so long as he's not getting his payday (whether that is actually the case or not).
I'm not saying there was a good choice there (assuming it was Apple pushing for the NDA) but he does not come out of it looking amazing.
Either Apple paid him off, or they threatened him with something that made him give up. I wonder which occurred.
I think apple are the ones coming out of this looking anything but amazing. I'd love to hear if Apple broke out the rubber hose or the wallet, but both are equally bad tbh.
If they were in the right, it would have been blasted from every Apple blog by now.
