HeartFitt v. HeartHero — Court Bars Trademark Takedown Requests to Apple and Google App Stores in Limited TRO

Background

HeartFitt LLC makes the Heart Hero Solo mobile app, which turns cardio exercise into an interactive game using a user’s real-time heart-rate data. It applied in 2025 to register the HEART HERO trademark, and that application is pending. HeartHero, Inc. makes automated external defibrillators (AEDs) and a companion app. It owns two 2019 federal registrations for logos showing a superhero with a lightning bolt in a heart-shaped chest above the word “HeartHero.” Although HeartHero is based in the United States, it markets its AED only abroad because it has not received FDA approval, which it expects in 2027.

After months of unsuccessful negotiations over HeartFitt’s branding, HeartHero sent takedown requests to the Apple App Store and Google Play. Google removed Heart Hero Solo. Apple told the parties to resolve the dispute themselves and asked to be kept informed. HeartFitt sued, seeking a declaration that it does not infringe HeartHero’s marks, cancellation of HeartHero’s registrations for alleged non-use, and relief for tortious interference with business relationships under Ohio law. On the day it filed, HeartFitt applied for a temporary restraining order (TRO) to stop further takedown requests to Apple or Google.

The Court’s Holding

The court granted the TRO, while stressing that the merits remain unclear. This order resolved only the TRO application; a preliminary injunction is to be decided on a fuller record.

Likelihood of success: murky, but not weak. On non-infringement, the court said some likelihood-of-confusion factors point each way: the marks are strikingly similar and both are used for mobile apps, but HeartHero’s AED and app are not available in the United States, making confusion in this country hard to see. On cancellation, because HeartHero’s marks were registered more than five years before the suit, cancellation is limited to specific grounds such as abandonment or fraud. HeartHero’s evidence of shipping devices for testing in 2018 and testing since 2020 left open whether there was use in commerce and whether there was a gap in use of up to three years between 2022 and 2026, and the record said little about fraudulent intent. On tortious interference, the court noted little case law on how Ohio’s factors apply when a party asserts trademark rights, and said HeartHero’s reliance on the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, which protects petitioning of government, may not extend to takedown requests sent to private app stores. It viewed a decision from the same district applying it to a trademark complaint to Groupon as on point but was not sure it would follow it. The court gave this factor little weight.

Irreparable harm, balance of harms and public interest favored HeartFitt. Losing its listing on the Apple App Store would compound lost customer goodwill and competitive position from the Google removal, harms that are hard to quantify, in the period before a preliminary injunction hearing. The court found the burden on HeartHero from the narrow relief to be “precisely zero,” because HeartHero does not offer its app or AED in the United States. The court accepted that confusion could in theory be dangerous in cardiac emergencies, but the TRO could not cause that harm because neither product is currently available here. It required no bond.

The order directs HeartHero and its agents to refrain from issuing trademark enforcement communications about HeartFitt’s current branding and trademark uses to Apple’s or Google’s mobile application stores, effective October 14, 2026. A TRO can last at most 28 days under Rule 65(b)(2).

Key Takeaways

• A court may enter a narrow TRO against further app store takedown requests even when the underlying trademark merits are uncertain, if the requested relief costs the other side essentially nothing.
• Because HeartHero sells nothing in the United States, the confusion-based harms it asserted were treated as unlikely to be affected by a short pause in takedown requests.
• A trademark owner cannot assume that Noerr-Pennington immunity protects takedown requests sent to private platforms; the court questioned whether that extension makes sense outside petitioning of government or litigation-linked conduct.
• Cancellation of a registration more than five years old requires proof of a specific statutory ground such as abandonment or fraud on the Trademark Office.

Why It Matters

For small app developers, app store takedowns can be sudden and costly, and this ruling shows that courts may be willing to step in quickly to preserve availability while a dispute is sorted out. For trademark owners, it is a caution that policing a mark through platform complaints can draw litigation, and that tortious-interference claims may survive where the rights asserted are uncertain.

The decision is a preliminary one. The court did not decide whether the marks are confusingly similar, whether HeartHero’s registrations should be cancelled, or whether the takedown requests were improper; those questions await further proceedings.