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Comment by cubicle67 | Hacker News Reader

The side-by-side screenshots http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/8122/comparisondw.jpg don't really help their cause. It does indeed look like they took another app and made a screen by screen rip-off of it. It's even been bitten by the same ugly bug that that bit the original.

Copy or not, I don't think Apple should remove them though.

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It doesn't really matter if they made a copy of it - they didn't steal the code . They copied functionality ok, they may have done that but it's like : Let's pull OpenOffice because they copied MSOffice . It's ridiculous .

They definitely shouldn't have removed them.

This isn't a court of law, it's a court of What Apple Says Goes. Their garden, their rules.

I find it very easy to understand why Apple doesn't want to allow a culture of crappy rip-offs to take root. Basic quality control.

Apple is defined as a culture of crappy rip-offs. Why would they care?

From what I saw of the screenshots, AppVault (removed) looked wayyy better. That's not a crappy rip-off, that's competition that is outdoing the predecessor. Facebook was a "rip-off" of MySpace yet society (mostly) has moved past MySpace.

The simlarities are not that relevant. There is a finite number of ways you can create a usable, say, calculator. Or battery mete. Or calendar. Specially when Apple takes such a strong position on interface conventions.

It's like Ford asking the government to prohibit Toyota from building cars because their steering wheel is round too.

Non-iPhone user here to provide a more objective baseline:

At a glance of the comparisons, I saw a total of 3 screens that actually looked like direct copies of each other. The ruler, balancer, and battery stats. The rest share similar functions but are obviously different in design and even details. I also count a total of six apps that AppBox simply doesn't have. That's out of twenty-six apps in total, at least on AppVault's side.

It seems like bad business to keep others from doing competitive business. Not if you're running a market place like the app store. It'd be like a farmer getting his cart kicked out because his fiji apples - amongst a selection of oranges and melons - are in competition with his more senior neighbor's granny smiths.

Level is a direct copy of example code from Apple (similar graphics too)

Battery stats is very similar to earlier battery apps

Ruler is the only thing that AppBox has introduced that AppVault has copied (that I can tell; perhaps there's prior art here too)

I actually see more differences rather than similarities.

this.

Seriously, there are DOZENS of apps that are utterly identical in function and layout with minor differences here and there. As far as apps go, these weren't even that similar.

I agree that a lot of them do look like copies. Of course when you are doing the shotgun approach to developing utility apps I think you should be ready to compete on the rate that you can keep adding apps. I see it hard to claim the ownership idea on something like a level when it is a very common object in everyday use.

As far as I can tell, both apps are basically compilations of stand-alone utility apps. I'm sure with enough digging one could find screenshots that can make an equally convincing case that each feature from each app was "ripped off" from an earlier single purpose app.

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