xAI’s lawsuit accusing Apple and OpenAI of anticompetitive practices has less to do with Grok’s App Store visibility, and more to do with a fixation Musk has had since he first acquired Twitter. Here are the details.
A bit of context
Last July, xAI released Grok 4, rolled out the Grok Imagine tool, and introduced customizable companion chatbots. This helped the Grok app climb from 60th place in the App Store ranking to 29th, according to historical data from AppFigures.
A few days after that, xAI made Grok 4 available for free to all users worldwide, which helped it rise to 5th place. That frustrated Elon Musk, who accused Apple of intentionally sandbagging Grok’s visibility in the App Store. The claim was immediately refuted by X’s own users:
Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2025
