So Elon's company sued Apple and OpenAI this week. Filed Monday, the 25th, in a federal court in Texas (of course it's Texas), and the core claim is basically this: Apple's App Store keeps putting ChatGPT in the "must have" slots while Grok sits further down the list, and xAI thinks thats not an accident but a handshake deal between Apple and OpenAI to keep Grok out of the spotlight.
I want to be upfront that I find it very hard to feel sorry for Elon Musk about anything at this point. Ive been writing this blog since November 2011 and Ive watched him go from "guy who makes electric cars and reusable rockets, kind of a weird poster but whatever" to whatever he is now, and my sympathy meter for his legal grievances sits pretty close to zero. He also threatened to sue over App Store rankings almost a year ago and never actually filed anything until now, which tells you something about how these threats usually work as PR rather than as law.
But heres the thing that actually bugs me, separate from who's doing the suing: app store ranking opacity is a real problem and has been for years. I run a Google Analytics-adjacent side project (not going to say what, some of you know) and I've spent actual hours staring at App Store category charts trying to figure out why an app jumps 40 spots overnight with no update, no press mention, nothing. Apple has never been transparent about what "Editor's Choice" or featured placement actually weighs. Is it downloads? Retention? Some internal taste committee? A combination nobody outside Cupertino has ever seen documented? You genuinely cannot know, and that opacity is exactly the kind of thing that invites lawsuits like this one whether or not the underlying claim has merit.
Grok, for what its worth, has been sitting in the top 5 of the Productivity category on my phone for a while now, so "buried" feels like a stretch as a factual claim. ChatGPT has just been the default in a lot of peoples heads since November 2022, the same way Kleenex became a word for tissue. That's brand momentum, not necessarily a conspiracy. Apple integrating ChatGPT into Siri last year (remember Apple Intelligence, remember how underwhelming that rollout actually was in practice) obviously helped OpenAI's visibility too, and thats a real business relationship Apple struck in the open, not some backroom favor.
None of that means Apple's ranking algorithm is clean. I just think the lawsuit reads more like Musk using the legal system as a marketing channel for Grok than a genuine antitrust concern, and I say that as someone who thinks Apple's App Store gatekeeping deserves way more scrutiny than it gets. The EU has been chipping at this for years with the DMA. A US court case from a billionaire with an obvious rival product in the same space is a weirder vehicle for that scrutiny than, say, regulators doing their job, but here we are.
OpenAI, for its part, put out a short statement calling the suit "a distraction" and didn't say much else, which is probably the smart legal move — don't feed the news cycle. Apple hasn't commented publicly as of this morning that I've seen.
Worth remembering too: this drops in the same stretch where half of tech Twitter (I still call it that, sue me) is glued to Nvidia's earnings from Wednesday and everyone's trying to parse whether AI infrastructure spending is cooling off or just pausing to catch its breath. A courtroom fight over app store real estate feels almost quaint next to that, but it's the kind of story that'll actually take a year or two to resolve, long after the earnings-call headlines are forgotten. I'll probably forget I wrote this post by the time anything happens with it in court, honestly. That's how most of these go.
Anyway. Coffee's cold, I've got a backlog of RSS feeds to get through, and somewhere in there is probably three more AI lawsuits I havent even heard about yet.