Apple and Amazon both agreed to end their lawsuit and allow both to use the name ‘App Store’ for their own products.
The Amazon Appstore is a mobile app store for Android devices launched on March 2011 while the Apple App Store is for devices running on iOS or Apple’s devices itself which opened in July 2008. Apple initiated the lawsuit in after Amazon launched the Appstore.
After over two years of dealing with the lawsuit, both companies requested U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, Calif., dismissal of the case. The next scheduled trial was supposed to happen on August 19.
The decision was said to be favorable for both parties as Apple will not have to waste money dealing with the case and Amazon not having to deal with the hassle of filing a counterclaim requesting permission to use the term. Well, it took them two years to realize that it wasn’t really a big deal to have their stores share the name because they are retailing different products anyway with different markets.
"We no longer see a need to pursue our case," Apple spokeswoman Kristin Huguet said to Reuters. "With more than 900,000 apps and 50 billion downloads, customers know where they can purchase their favorite apps."
Martin Glick, a lawyer for Amazon, said in an interview, "This was a decision by Apple to unilaterally abandon the case, and leave Amazon free to use 'appstore.'"
The original argument presented by Apple in 2011 was that Amazon purposely used the term Appstore to attract customers to purchase its Kindle Fire tablets which happened to be Apple’s iPad competition back then. Amazon contradicted the accusation saying that the term ‘app store’ is a generic term and that customers know the difference between an app store for Android and iOS.
