Apple’s head of keyboards loved his FlickType keyboard app for the Apple Watch, gushing over how few mistakes it made.

This Tuesday, Apple revealed its own swipe keyboard app alongside the new Apple Watch Series 7.

But this isn’t your typical case of whether a developer should be entitled to their income or whether users deserve the functionality for free — and not just because Apple’s making users pay for a new Watch to get it.

In March, he filed a lawsuit against the company over his app, alleging that the company continued to reject and hold up his Apple Watch keyboard for months in an attempt to force him to sell it to Apple for cheap.

Here’s the part where you might be thinking: “Wait, didn’t Apple ban every keyboard app for the Apple Watch back in 2019?” or “Didn’t Eleftheriou just tweet that rejection message and say ‘see you in court’ a couple days ago?”.

But no, Apple didn’t actually reject every Apple Watch keyboard app in 2019 — Eleftheriou believes his app was singled out for this treatment.

Originally, the company didn’t think it was appropriate for a keyboard to take up the entirety of the Apple Watch’s small screen, but decided differently in 2019 after it saw the potential and says it’s encouraged Apple Watch keyboards ever since.

In the complaint, he alleges it wasn’t until January 2020, a year after the surprise takedown, that his Apple Watch keyboard extension was approved.

When FlickType for Apple Watch did finally arrive, it became the number one paid app in the entire store, pulled in $130,000 in its first month, he claims, and was named one of Apple’s top paid apps of 2020.

And last month, Eleftheriou publicly gave up on his popular iPhone keyboard extension for the blind after one too many rejections, due to what he describes as the latest misunderstanding by Apple’s App Review team of how his app (and the company’s own VoiceOver screen reader technology) are supposed to work.

I will be delighted to bring back the accessible FlickType Keyboard for iPhone when Apple finally fixes their broken 3rd-party keyboard APIs on iOS and allows developers to fairly compete with Apple’s own keyboard.

I’ve already poured thousands of hours developing my app, working around countless keyboard API issues and dealing with app review, so I’m really looking forward to Apple’s improvements and will promptly re-submit the FlickType VoiceOver keyboard when sufficient progress has been made in these areas

He’s particularly annoyed with how Apple’s own keyboard has an unfair advantage since it doesn’t need to use its own APIs, and how those APIs are lacking features that Apple publicly promised years ago

Technically, Eleftheriou is the one making the iPhone keyboard extension disappear, not Apple