Musi for YouTube Removed From the App Store
Musi, a free music-streaming app only available on iPhone, sued Apple last week, arguing that Apple breached Musi’s developer agreement by abruptly removing the app from its App Store for no good reason.
According to Musi, Apple decided to remove Musi from the App Store based on allegedly “unsubstantiated” claims from YouTube that Musi was infringing on YouTube’s intellectual property. The removal came, Musi alleged, based on a five-word complaint from YouTube that simply said Musi was “violating YouTube terms of service”—without ever explaining how. And YouTube also lied to Apple, Musi’s complaint said, by claiming that Musi neglected to respond to YouTube’s efforts to settle the dispute outside the App Store when Musi allegedly showed evidence that the opposite was true.
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In its complaint, Musi fully admits that its app’s streams come from “publicly available content on YouTube’s website.” But rather than relying on YouTube’s Application Programming Interface (API) to make the content available to Musi users—which potentially could violate YouTube’s terms of service—Musi claims that it designed its own “augmentative interface.” That interface, Musi said, does not “store, process, or transmit YouTube videos” and instead “plays or displays content based on the user’s own interactions with YouTube and enhances the user experience via Musi’s proprietary technology.”
Musi launched back in 2016, and proved a big hint with teens in particular, as it provided completely free music streams without the audio ad interruptions you get on Spotify’s free tier.
By the beginning of this year, Musi was actually bigger than many of its rivals.
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The Google-owned company said that Musi violated its terms of service by doing this, while the service claimed it was effectively just acting as a web browser and therefore was doing nothing wrong.
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Kind of shows just how closed the openly browsed web has become, in spirit if not literally in fact.
So glad to see a developer actually suing Apple by their service terms. Should have happened long time ago and many times since.
The problem with mandatory app stores is that it give large companies and governments the ability to suppress applications they simply do not like. I personally feel that is wrong.
