Ontario-based Rave Inc. says Apple quietly kicked it out of the App Store right after Apple rolled out its own watch-together feature, and now the co-watching startup is firing back in court. On Thursday, the company filed antitrust lawsuits accusing Apple of illegally removing the Rave app in 2025, cutting off iPhone and Mac access for millions of users and splintering the online communities built around its service. Rave is asking judges to put the app back on iOS and macOS and to award what its complaint describes as hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
Rave’s Case and the Press Release
In a press release carried by Business Wire, Rave says Apple told the company it was yanking the app over unspecified fraud and content-moderation issues. Rave calls those reasons a smokescreen. CEO Michael Pazaratz says Apple’s move “harmed consumers” and “disrupted the communities built on Rave,” arguing that Apple’s own behavior, not Rave’s, is what should be under the microscope.
The company says it has since built out new moderation and age-verification tools and assembled legal teams in multiple countries. According to the release, Rave has filed parallel lawsuits not only in the United States but also in Canada, Brazil, the Netherlands and Russia, setting up a multi-front fight over Apple’s power to control access to its platforms.
The Lawsuit and Where It Was Filed
According to Reuters, the U.S. complaint landed in federal court in New Jersey. Rave is asking the court to order Apple to restore the app on Apple platforms and to sign off on hundreds of millions in damages.
The filing says Apple removed Rave in 2025 for what Apple labeled as dishonest or fraudulent activity. Rave insists that the explanation is a pretext, arguing the real motive was to sideline a competitor to Apple’s own SharePlay feature, which Apple introduced in 2021 as a built-in way for users to watch content together. As Reuters notes, Rave is still available on Android and Windows, but after Apple’s move, it disappeared from iOS and macOS.
Where This Fits in the App Store Fight
The timing is not exactly friendly to Apple. The new lawsuit drops while the company is already facing renewed legal scrutiny over how it controls app distribution and in-app payments. Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to pause a contempt order tied to Apple’s long-running battle with Epic Games, keeping pressure on Apple’s App Store rules.
The Next Web notes that procedural rulings in the Epic saga are still shaping how judges and regulators look at platform behavior. Rave’s lawyers are expected to lean into that backdrop and argue that Apple’s takedown of Rave was not about safety at all, but about protecting Apple’s own co-viewing tool from a cross-platform rival.
What Rave Is Asking For
Rave’s complaint asks courts to order Apple to bring the app back to iOS and macOS and to award significant damages for lost users and lost business, per Business Wire. The company argues Apple’s decision shrank consumer choice and insulated Apple’s own co-viewing product from head-to-head competition with a service that runs on multiple operating systems.
In its press materials, Rave also points to newly deployed moderation technology and says it has published additional documentation at SaveRave.com and related sites, pitching itself as a responsible platform that was nevertheless sidelined by a much larger gatekeeper.
Legal Implications
Antitrust cases about app stores typically hinge on how courts define the relevant market and on whether platform rules can be defended as genuine safety measures or are really a cover for shutting out rivals. Years of litigation in the Epic case have already generated precedent and procedural guideposts that Rave will try to use to argue Apple misused App Store policies to disadvantage a competitor.
Apple has not publicly commented on Rave’s filings, MacRumors reports. The next big milestones will likely be Apple’s formal response and any early motions from Rave asking for emergency relief to get the app back online for Apple users while the case proceeds.
No one should expect a quick resolution. The early phase is likely to be all about motions, briefs and fights over jurisdiction. Any decision on damages or wide-ranging changes to App Store policies would come much later. In the meantime, developers and platform-watchers will be glued to the U.S. court docket, as well as to Rave’s parallel cases abroad, for clues about how judges will treat cross-platform challengers to Apple’s built-in services.
