“Anger is growing in China over Apple’s treatment of developers, with a second group of app designers filing a legal complaint against the iPhone maker,” Yuan Yang reports for the Financial Times. “Apple started a worldwide crackdown on what it saw as illegitimate apps earlier this year, removing more than 1m Chinese apps from the company’s App Store in the year to date, according to the tech research firm ASO 100.”
“Apple routinely launches mass clean-ups of its App Store, and it is not unusual for the group to delete tens of thousands of programs at one time,” Yang reports. “However, it has cut almost 200,000 more Chinese apps than those from the US so far this year.”
“Last month, a Beijing-based law firm, Dare & Sure, filed the first Chinese antitrust case against Apple on behalf of 28 developers. Their case has now expanded to cover more than 50 developers. Now a second law firm in Chengdu, western China is alleging similar mistreatment on behalf of 23 more developers,” Yang reports. “Both Beijing-based Dare & Sure and Chengdu-based Sichuan Fa Ye Law Firm alleged Apple was abusing its control of the iOS App Store, the only official source of app downloads for iPhones, by removing apps without good reason… Many developers said apps that may seem like copies of others would often be for different audiences or regions, and that they did not understand how Apple decided which apps were the originals.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Apple probably decides which apps are the originals by submission date which seems entirely logical.
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