Rave has had very poor user content moderation for years, so Apple booted it from the App Store. Now the company is suing Apple, but it’s not telling the whole story.
In August 2025, Apple removed Rave from its App Store. According to Rave, Apple never gave developers the exact reason for this decision.
“11.4 million users have been locked out,” reads SaveRave.com, “Apple has disabled Apple Sign-in for Rave, locking users out of accounts they had been using for years.”
There is more.
“Apple revoked Rave’s developer certificate, causing macOS to block Rave with a false malware warning,” it says.
Rave says he tried to work with Apple. He asked what he had done wrong, and the tech giant reportedly responded with “one vague clause.”
The company says Apple’s reasons and timelines keep changing. Ultimately, Apple issued a permanent removal notice and refused to work with Rave.
Today, Rave is suing Apple in five countries: the United States, the Netherlands, Brazil, Russia and its home country of Canada.
Rave claims that Apple removed its app, which had been around for about a decade, and which competed with Apple’s own co-viewing platform, SharePlay. It is likely that Apple would not do this love direct competition, because that is the case to have a competing feature.
It’s not that simple.
Out of character
So let’s assume that Apple considers Rave a direct competitor to SharePlay. And let’s forget the fact that SharePlay probably isn’t a feature that Apple sees as a major driver of sales or subscriptions in the first place.
Apple isn’t in the habit of banning competitors or booting apps from the App Store that it has “Sherlocked” along the way.
To date, it has not banned Spotify, although it owns competing services Apple Music and Apple Podcasts. Apple doesn’t ban Netflix, Disney+ or Hulu, even though Apple TV exists.
Apple is accused of Sherlocking, quite often creating a proprietary tool that is almost functionally identical to a third-party tool. And to be clear, yes, Apple offers Sherlock features.
However, Apple does not do this withdraw Or to forbid these applications. When Apple introduced invitations in 2025, this is not the case to forbid Partiful, still available on the iOS App Store.
He didn’t remove or ban Omnifocus or Things 3 or Fantastical or Luna Display. Apple completely siphoned off users and potentially prevented new users from joining due to the native functionality being good enough.
This is not the argument Rave makes.
Bubbling from the sewers
Rave uses the classic “I’m just a little guy” tactic here. According to Rave’s press release:
“As long as Apple’s ‘gatekeeper’ power remains unchecked, no developer operating within Apple’s ecosystem can ever be safe. When a dominant platform suppresses competing products without fair process or accountability, all developers are deterred from investing in the type of innovation that builds businesses, creates jobs, and benefits consumers.”
Rave is a little dishonest about the path that led to its removal in 2025. Okay, maybe it’s a little more than a little dishonest.
For years, Rave has been plagued with problems. And not just minor issues, although I suppose that depends on what definition of “minor” you’re working with.
The app was significantly under-moderated. Each stream had a chat room, which meant that public viewing “rooms” were completely unmoderated.
According to Rave’s terms of service, users must only be 13 years old to use the service. If a room was under-moderated or not, it would put minors at undue risk.
That alone would be reason enough for Apple, at the very least, to tell Rave to put its ducks in a row. Especially since the protections of Section 230 would not apply due to a lack of good faith restraint.
It’s even worse.
A quick perusal of Reddit and some emails we received over the years the app was active shows many users complaining about instances of child abuse material (CSAM), pornography, blood, and more. Additionally, the app was often flooded with links to platforms like Telegram and Signal, specifically to direct more people to illegal content.
It was also known, for a time, as a hotbed of scammers and bots. Even Google had temporarily removed Rave – just recently, I might add – citing security and malware concerns.
The issues mentioned above were widespread just five months ago. Apple removed the Rave app in August 2025.
Since then, Rave says it has strengthened its security protocols. It has AI-based moderation tools specifically designed to prevent grooming and predatory patterns in chat, age verification, hash matching with child safety databases, blood detection, and preventing links to external apps like Telegram.
It appears that he has, at the very least, implemented the strict minimum moderation system. Complaints posted by users on Reddit have declined over the past six months, suggesting the problem may be less serious now.
However, it seems that Rave users are now complaining about “unfair bans”. These posts have increased over the past six months.
Notably, Rave allows users to stream pornography even after the security update. This is not a secret use, with some users on Reddit asking for ways to bypass the “bugged” age verification to do this.
Given Apple’s history of trying to keep apps that facilitate pornography viewing off its platform, it stands to reason that it won’t be bringing Rave back to the App Store anytime soon. And that doesn’t even meet Apple’s mandate that user-generated content be moderated.
And, given legal precedent, this is unlikely to be forced.