VK Holding simultaneously filed a lawsuit with the Moscow Arbitration Court against three Apple institutions: the Russian legal entity Apple Rus, the parent company Apple Inc. and the Irish Apple Distribution International. The official reason was the massive delisting of VK apps from Russian app stores on June 25: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki, Zen, VK Video, VK Music, Mail.ru and Max Messenger immediately disappeared from the stores subsequently. Apple mentioned sanctions, even though VK itself was not subject to restrictions at the time – EU sanctions were only imposed on the holding company and Max developers on July 13, retroactively “legalizing” what Apple had done a month earlier.
VK Holding lost 1,350,000 users after pulling its app from stores, but the company denies everything and assures it is recording growth
In the lawsuit, VK asks that the app be returned to the store, push notifications reinstated to users, and penalties imposed if Apple decides to ignore the court ruling — which is historically what the U.S. tech giant has done. Google already has a rich record in Russia: for refusing to unblock Russian media’s YouTube channels, the company was fined more than 5 million rubles, which is effectively unrecoverable – an amount confirmed by the Supreme Court, but with no redeeming qualities at all, as Google has neither a legal entity nor assets in the country. Lawyers have publicly stated that VK’s lawsuit has similar prospects: The App Store User Agreement gives Apple the right to remove any content without explanation, and forcing an American company outside Russia to comply with a Russian court ruling is a separate and impractical task.
At the same time, FAS is also putting pressure on Apple – the company is accused of refusing to pre-install RuStore and Max Messenger on iPhones and faces the threat of fines of up to 4 billion rubles. If the lawsuits continue to pile up, this means one thing for gamers: The Russian App Store will continue to live its own independent, increasingly isolated life, and the RuStore and parallel imports from fallback options will become the primary way to install and update apps and games without having to dance around the Apple ID and account area shaking a tambourine. Theoretically, a 2022 scenario is also possible, where deleted VK apps quietly return to the store within a month – but given the current level of conflict, it’s not worth counting on.
