Developer and App Store critic Kosta Eleftheriou has settled his lawsuit with Apple, according to a report from TechCrunch. The suit, filed in March 2021, argued that Apple made it difficult for him to sell his app, Flicktype, on the App Store, after it seemingly lost interest in acquiring the tech.
The lawsuit alleged that Apple used its monopoly power as maker of the iPhone and as the company in charge of the App Store to “crush” developers competing with it through “exploitive fees and selective application of opaque and unreasonable constraints.” Eleftheriou also accused Apple of doing little to stem the tide of copycat scam apps that tricked potential users of his app, a swipe-based keyboard for the Apple Watch. (This was, by the w
ay, right around the time that Apple and Epic were also duking it out in court over how much power the iPhone maker should have over how software is distributed on iOS.)
The lawsuit, which you can read more about here, was dismissed at the request of Eleftheriou’s company, Kpaw, earlier this summer. Apple didn’t immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment about the settlement.
In an interview with The Verge, Eleftheriou said he wasn’t able to comment on the settlement or his feelings about it. However, he was able to offer some suggestions about what Apple could do to improve the App Store going forward. He said that most of the suggestions my colleague Sean Hollister made last year in his article “Eight things Apple could do to prove it actually cares about App Store users” were still on the table, and would be a start.