Apple suppressed competitors in its App Store — until it got caught, a lawsuit alleges

An email app developer says it has uncovered new data that suggests Apple has long been suppressing the rankings of apps in the App Store that compete with Apple’s own offerings, according to new court filings by the developer, which sued Apple in October for patent infringement and antitrust violations. Blix, which developed the BlueMail app, made the discovery only when Apple’s rankings suddenly changed in its favor. At the end of September, Blix unexpectedly jumped from 143rd in Apple’s ranking for mail apps to 13th. Blix had for years been highly ranked in the competing Android app stores, run by companies like Google, Samsung, Amazon and Huawei. But on Apple’s iOS, where it competes with Apple’s own mail app, it had long been ranked very low. Blix started looking at other apps that also compete with Apple’s preinstalled apps. Several others, such as a mail app from Russian tech company Yandex, had also seen dramatic spikes in their rankings. Blix says it used market research firm Sensor Tower to research the unexplained spike in BlueMail’s ranking on the iOS store, which happened on Sept. 26. Using Sensor Tower’s historical data, it was able to determine that BlueMail wasn’t the only app that had experienced the spike.