People are buying audio interfaces specifically for Akai devices, but without testing them thoroughly or at all. I did that too! I took an MPC One to a store and tested if it works with Focusrite Scarlett 18i20 3rd gen. Yeah, it seemed to work! So I bought the Focusrite. Bzzzzzt, mistake. There is a short dropout every 30-40 seconds, as if there was an audio clock synchronization problem. You probably won't notice it in a short test. No such dropouts with Windows or Mac. Focusrite support blamed Akai and Akai support blamed Focusrite. And they of course blamed me, the USB cable (try it with a ferrite bead!? that was one suggestion from support), and anything imaginable. When I mentioned that I had ALSO tested with the 18i20 synced to another device via coax SPDIF, then they suggested the problem was caused by a bad RCA cable. Anyway, problem solved, because something was answered to me. Hand waving and shrugs. A "list of working/non-working devices" thead on this forum, containing incredible amounts of bad, incorrect, imprecise, unreliable or outright false information from people who don't know what they're doing. The only useful result from that thread is, the Behringer UMC 1820 seems to work.
But the Focusrite 18i20... I wanted to test it with Linux as well. I installed Linux Mint 20, and the Scarlett seemed to be very problematic, even much worse than with Akai. I eventually got it working perfectly, but I had to build a new kernel from source, and when studying that stuff I realized that the kernel contains lots of device-specific "quirks" or whatever they're called. A lot of special case code is needed specifically for the Scarlett boxes, and even for each "gen" version... How can that be if they're class compliant?
It turns out that even though there is supposedly a "standard" and the devices supposedly comply with it, the truth is much more complicated. The devil is in the details. There are lots of very specific situations where the host and audio interface do something slightly incompatible, even though both might claim to be working according to the specification. So what happens in reality is that audio interface manufacturers test their devices with a set of host devices such as iPads and Macs, and tweak things until it works with those. And that's why they sometimes say seemingly absurd things like "Mac class compliant". It means it works without drivers with Macs. What comes to other hosts, nothing is promised. Doesn't work with Akai? That's your problem. Go fix that Akai then.
Akai didn't code all of their USB audio support from scratch themselves, they got it from the Linux kernel, and it is a big and evolving thing. There may be device-specific fixes available in newer kernels than whatever Akai is using. But Akai are going to actually fix it, they'll have to incorporate those fixes to their products and make it work one by one by testing and tweaking. They have to have skilled coders with good tools and testing facilities, and time and other resources allocated to it. Dedication from management. And they need to actually have all the audio interfaces they want to make their boxes work with! ALL of them really, because they can be slightly different, and the interface manufacturers probably only test with Macs and iPads. Or maybe Akai just take newer or different kernel versions, throw it in a software update and hope for the best?
The guy who writes the Focusrite Scarlett compatibility code for Linux, has most of the Scarlett boxes, some donated to him I guess.