This is most likely a direct result of the recent Supreme Court decision in Apple v Pepper where the Supreme Court upheld the Ninth's decision that app buyers could sue Apple for price inflation.<p>One of Apple's arguments in that case was that Apple couldn't be sued by app purchasers because they could be sued by app developers. Think of it sort of as Apple claiming a sort of "Double Jeopardy" defense. The Supreme Court wrote that this argument was not persuasive:<p><i>It is true that Apple’s alleged anticompetitive conduct
may leave Apple subject to multiple suits by different
plaintiffs. But Illinois Brick did not purport to bar
multiple liability that is unrelated to passing an
overcharge down a chain of distribution. Basic antitrust
law tells us that the “mere fact that an antitrust violation
produces two different classes of victims hardly entails
that their injuries are duplicative of one another.” 2A
Areeda & Hovenkamp ¶339d, at 136. Multiple suits are
not atypical when the intermediary in a distribution chain
is a bottleneck monopolist or monopsonist (or both)
between the manufacturer on the one end and the
consumer on the other end. A retailer who is both a
monopolist and a monopsonist may be liable to different
classes of plaintiffs—both to downstream consumers and
to upstream suppliers—when the retailer’s unlawful
conduct affects both the downstream and upstream
markets.</i><p>This new lawsuit appears to be app developers taking that quote to heart.