Rave sues Apple over App Store removal

App stores are distribution systems, but they’re also control points. That’s why this fight matters. Rave — a watch-together app that works across iPhone, Android, Windows, and Mac — sued Apple on May 7, saying Apple kicked it out of the App Store not for safety reasons, but to protect Apple’s own SharePlay feature. Apple says the opposite — that Rave repeatedly violated App Store rules, including around pornographic, pirated, and CSAM-related content. ### What is Rave, exactly? Rave is a co-viewing app. It lets people in different places watch the same movie, show, or video at the same time and chat while they do it. The important part is not just “watch together.” It’s that Rave says it works across ecosystems, so an iPhone user can watch with someone on Android or Windows instead of staying inside Apple’s world. Rave says the app has more than 225 million downloads. (money.usnews.com) ### Why is Apple’s SharePlay part of this? Because SharePlay is Apple’s built-in answer to the same basic use case. Apple launched SharePlay in 2021, and it lets Apple users sync media and talk during playback. Rave’s claim is basically this: once Apple had its own co-viewing product, an independent cross-platform rival became inconvenient. So when Apple later removed Rave, Rave says that wasn’t neutral rule enforcement — it was exclusion. (businesswire.com) ### What does Rave say Apple did wrong? Rave says Apple removed the app from the App Store in 2025 using pretext — first framing the issue as dishonest or fraudulent activity, and more broadly raising content-moderation concerns. In the lawsuit, Rave says the real effect was to block iPhone users from using a rival product and to make cross-platform viewing harder. Rave is asking for reinstatement plus “hundreds of millions of dollars” in damages. (money.usnews.com) ### What does Apple say back? Apple is not treating this like a competition case. It says the app was removed after repeated guideline violations that had been communicated to Rave multiple times. Apple’s statement points to hosting and sharing pornographic and pirated content, plus user complaints involving CSAM. That matters because if a court sees the removal as ordinary trust-and-safety enforcement, Rave’s antitrust framing gets much harder to prove. (money.usnews.com) ### Why is “cross-platform” the real battleground? Because the whole complaint is built around ecosystem lock-in. SharePlay works inside Apple’s ecosystem. Rave says its value was that it connected Apple users with non-Apple users, and that this threatened Apple’s incentive to keep iPhone experiences self-contained. Think of it less like one app getting rejected and more like a bridge being removed between two islands. That’s the theory Rave is trying to sell to courts. (money.usnews.com) ### Why file in five countries? Rave says it filed antitrust actions in the U.S., Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands, and Russia. That tells you this is not just about getting one app relisted. It’s pressure from multiple legal angles, in multiple regulatory environments, aimed at Apple’s role as a gatekeeper. Companies do this when they think the platform-power issue is bigger than one local dispute. (businesswire.com) ### So what’s the bigger stakes here? The immediate question is whether Apple removed a dangerous app or kneecapped a rival. But the larger fight is about how much freedom a dominant platform has to cite safety, moderation, or fraud concerns when the app it removes also happens to compete with its own product. Apple has already been dragged through years of App Store antitrust battles. Rave is trying to fit its case into that same pressure campaign. (businesswire.com) ### Bottom line? Rave’s lawsuit is small in company size but big in theory. If Rave can show Apple used App Store rules as a competitive weapon, that’s a real antitrust problem. If Apple can show the app was a genuine safety and moderation mess, the case looks a lot more like routine platform policing. Either way, this is another test of whether Apple’s App Store is just a marketplace — or a moat. (money.usnews.com)