After Apple’s rejections, FlickType abandons popular iPhone keyboard for the blind

If you’re a blind or visually impaired iPhone user who uses the FlickType keyboard to type, I have bad news: you are about to become a victim of the fight between Apple and one of its most ardent critics. Developer Kosta Eleftheriou has announced that it is shutting down the iPhone keyboard part of its app and said that the keyboard will be automatically removed in a future update.

You may have heard that the whole app is going to disappear, and that’s not true, says Eleftheriou The edge. In January 2020, it added a swipe-to-type Apple Watch keyboard to FlickType which saw the app skyrocket to become the number one paid app in the entire Apple App Store for some time. , and this app will continue to exist and continue to contain that. Apple Watch keyboard. Eleftheriou says the app has nearly half a million downloads, but it doesn’t have a breakdown of how many of those users specifically use the iPhone keyboard.

If the name sounds familiar to you, it’s because Eleftheriou is the same developer who dug holes in Apple’s App Store image for months, highlighting how blatant scams, secret gambling dens and review frauds continue to pass through corporate filters even though they are fairly easy for anyone to uproot. His fight got personal long before today: he sued Apple in March for seemingly shady behavior, alleging that Apple put up roadblocks on its FlickType keyboard in order to convince it to sell the technology to Apple at a discount. , while relying on fraudulent mobile keyboard apps. on the App Store.

Now, says Eleftheriou, Apple has suddenly decided to reject FlickType yet again – and for some reason it has successfully chatted with them in the past. He shared the rejection letter with The edge, and it’s a pretty straightforward argument: Apple says the keyboard should work even if a user doesn’t give it “full access” to network access and other iOS features. But Eleftheriou says if Apple actually tried to use the app, or looked at their previous chats, they would see the keyboard work.

To be clear, Apple’s own developer guidelines state that “full access” is not an issue: the only dispute here is whether the app continues to work if a user turns it off – which is why. is the case, says Eleftheriou, if you turn on VoiceOver. . “They should try it out as a VoiceOver user, which they don’t seem to bother to do. I’ve had several rejections in the past because the reviewer didn’t know anything about VoiceOver, ”says Eleftheriou.

As his Twitter feed explains, Eleftheriou considers this to be the last straw for this specific feature:

“Our history of releases already spans over FOUR pages filled with repeated, unwarranted and unreasonable releases that serve to frustrate and delay rather than benefit end users. And dealing with App Review isn’t just time consuming. It’s also very emotionally draining, ”he writes.

Eleftheriou does not accuse Apple of retaliation, in a separate conversation on Twitter DM. “I can only speculate on this rejection, but I recently had a lot of other rejections that I haven’t talked about yet, and ignoring my attempts to reach them is also new,” he says.

“I can’t really know, but I really feel like some kind of ‘special’ treatment is going on,” he said. The edge.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment.