Apple abuses popular keyboard for the blind out of existence
FlickType is a name possibly familiar to many people struggling with vision impairment in the modern world. It is an extremely popular keyboard app for both watches and smartphones, that has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of blind or low-vision Apple tech users in recent months.
When it became available for the Apple Watch as a swipe-to-type keyboard, FlickType rose to the top as the number one paid app in the whole of Apple's App Store for a while—a significant achievement—as it racked up half a million downloads up to the present day.
Apple doesn't seem to care, however, as the company has long been at odds with the developer and has been making it as difficult as possible for him to continue offering the service on iPhones.
The developer, Eleftheriou, says he's done everything he can to keep the app available in Apple's tightening ecosystem, but Apple has simply made this no longer possible, and he is being forced to permanently withdraw FlickType from iOS support.
Apple has been throwing rejection after attack after rejection at the valuable app—a whopping forty pages of it, claims Eleftheriou. And some of the complaints Apple is lodging against the developer are allegedly utter nonsense.
Our rejection history already spans more than FOURTY pages filled with repeated, unwarranted, & unreasonable rejections that serve to frustrate & delay rather than benefit end-users. And dealing with App Review isn’t just time-consuming. It’s also very emotionally draining. —Eleftheriou
These unwarranted objections reach the point of absurdity, Eleftheriou says, with Apple recently rejecting his app on the grounds that the virtual keyboard is required to work even without obtaining “full access” to a network or other parts of the phone software. The issue here is that the app does work without "full access," and Eleftheriou has apparently already proven this fact to them multiple times before, but Apple simply refuses to acknowledge it.
FlickType on iOS works fine without full access, as long as users have VoiceOver on—a feature designed exactly with the visually impaired in mind, that describes what's happening on the screen and lets you browse web pages using voice command. However, one Apple reviewer who rejected his app didn't even understand how Apple's own VoiceOver worked, Eleftheriou claims.
It's with a heavy heart today that we're announcing the discontinuation of our award-winning iPhone keyboard for blind users.
— FlickType Watch Keyboard (@FlickType) August 16, 2021
Apple has thrown us obstacle after obstacle for years while we try to provide an app to improve people's lives, and we can no longer endure their abuse. pic.twitter.com/cH1HCQzeP1
None of it is just accidents or hiccups in the algorithm on Apple's side, it seems, but personal attacks in what has become a near war between the two entities. Eleftheriou had fallen into Apple's bad graces far before this final rejection, mentions The Verge (who reported on it).
Eleftheriou had been speaking out against Apple's shady behavior for months, such as trying to essentially coerce him into selling his FlickType software to them by throwing countless unwarranted roadblocks at him—even while other sham keyboard apps were allowed to thrive unhindered in the App Store.
It came to a point that Apple simply stopped responding to Eleftheriou's attempts to resolve the ridiculous issues, the developer tells The Verge.
I can only speculate about this [latest] rejection, but I’ve recently had many more rejections I haven’t talked about yet, and them ignoring my attempts to reach them is also new. I can’t really know, but definitely feels like some kind of ‘special’ treatment going on.
It should be noted that FlickType will continue to be available for download to the Apple Watch—which is where it gained mass popularity—as it is only being permanently discontinued from the iPhone itself. The virtual keyboard will automatically disappear in an upcoming update.
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