A lawsuit over App Store abuses has been given the green light to proceed, at least on some fronts. The case, filed in California’s Superior Court in Santa Clara County last March, hails from app developer and former Pinterest engineer, Kosta Eleftheriou, who claims his keyboard app FlickType was initially unfairly rejected from Apple’s App Store, then later targeted by scammers once approved, leading to lost revenues.
The judge has ruled that at least half the claims can proceed to trial and is giving Eleftheriou the opportunity to amend the remaining items.
Eleftheriou has become known as an outspoken App Store critic in recent months, often serving as the source for stories about App Store scams like a crypto wallet app that scammed a user out of his life savings (~$600,000) in bitcoin; a kids game that actually contained a hidden online casino; and a VPN app scamming users out of $5 million per year, among others. His findings even became the subject of a line of questioning during a Senate antitrust hearing in April 2021, where Georgia’s Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) questioned Apple Chief Compliance Officer Kyle Andeer as to Apple was not able to locate these sorts of scams itself, given they were “trivially easy to identify.”
