Hit Japanese app Crabhouse forced to change name on iOS

Yep, I think Apple is imposing its own international standards for trademarks, which feels like over-stepping but countries often don't place nice in these business areas. There should be some formal, international way to register your trademark ... oh, right. We have that [1]

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrid_system

Noguchi Hideyo is on the ¥1000 bill, so I think GP just added an extra zero?

But that’s odd, since king crab is pretty expensive. I’d be suspicious of any place serving it for ¥1000!

> Unless you’re flush with cash, you rename the app.

Or if you're willing to take the gamble. My default response to C&Ds (and other similar notices) that have no actual legal justifiability behind them is a nice succinct "fuck off", and I've yet to receive any follow-up from about a dozen such interactions.

Now at least some of those "legal notices" were clearly from people who had never interacted with a lawyer in their lives (my personal favourite was someone who insisted that having their username on a ban list for cheating in a video game was a violation of the GDPR), but there's a lot of entities who have a track record of spamming anyone they can find with vague threats in the hope that some people will cave in to their bullying, fully aware that they can do absolutely nothing to those who don't.

I'm no expert on Japanese trademark law, but I suspect it's very unlikely that Clubhouse has any case here.

It's perfectly reasonable to not distribute on Apple platforms. Many companies choose to do this, and have for decades!

The viable alternative is a web page. But yes, if you want the security and performance supported on a native Apple platform, you have to play by Apple's rules.

Harm to companies isn't harm to consumers.

Competition law should work in the inserts of consumers, not private business. As long as consumers are voluntarily choosing to lock themselves behind this walled garden, I don't see why their user experience should be degraded to further business interests.

Don't forget 'Apple' :)

I agree that it's very arbitrary, but the justification that it could set a precedent by allowing effectively "copycat" application using spelling to mislead users holds some water IMO. It's especially problematic when application names are translated in other scripts and languages, which is the case here.

Imagine if a south african made a "facebok" app to share pictures of goats (bok meaning goat in afrikaans), I'm sure it would be rejected on the same grounds.

But I agree that the decision is very arbitrary and it can be frustrating if you're on the receiving end, but such is life on Apple's walled garden. Like it or leave it.

I really don't care to defend Apple in particular, I think the only Apple product I've ever owned was an old school hard-drive ipod over a decade ago.

It's just that Apple has always been pretty clear that it's going to push whatever arbitrary rules it sees fit to ensure a certain level of quality on its platform and that's par for the course.

I agree that de-facto having to choose between Android on one hand and iphones on the other is not ideal and I'd like more competition in this space, but at least there is an alternative and there are plenty of Android smartphones that can be rooted to give you full access if you so desire. It's not ideal, but I really find it hard to find a flaw in Apple's approach to these things if their objective is to create a somewhat "premium" curated platform.

The problem with that logic is that it doesn’t address how this situation came to be. Apple has been consistent about their product vision since basically day one, and on day one they were the underdog... a drop in the pond. The thing is that over YEARS the market (people) consistently voted with their wallets to validate this vision. That’s why they are what they are now. This has two implications: 1) The reason it’s happening is due to long term choice in the market, i.e. this ecosystem is filling a need that whiners are ignoring, and 2) It ignores the fact that if your stated hopes actually came to pass, someone else would just execute on good hardware with a walled garden (with the resulting more consistent and reliable experience) and become popular AGAIN... after all, that’s what just happened this time.

People will answer this post saying “that’s not true, you can totally have the iOS experience with side-loading/whatever”. Those people also likely believe that the “right communism” just hasn’t been tried yet. If one could actually do this then likely someone would have tried it and succeeded already. Another way to realize that is to understand you are just describing Android, and a perfectly valid existing choice (actually, several choices in a family). Additionally, those people are ignoring the fact that the security/convenience/consistency trade-offs made in any ecosystem do have consequences (positive and negative from varying perspectives).

Which leads us back to the parent: If one wants a different trade-off (which is totally valid and I have happily owned and developed for both systems in the past) then pick a different ecosystem and buy into it. MY personal pie in the sky wish is that people would quit pissing on other people who don’t want to be forced to make THEIR choice. Please take your choices and stop advocating to take MINE away.

This - my parents phones keep getting updates after purchase. They never updated their cheap android (or maybe updates lagged badly and there were none). People are our paying EXTRA for Apple gate keeping pretty happily

I was trying to distribute a macOS app to a friend to test it out. The friend said their Mac told them the app was damaged and they should move it to the Trash.

Apparently I have to get a Developer account, obtain a Developer ID certificate, sign every build with this certificate, and upload the build to Apple to have them "notarize" the signature.

The alternative is to teach my friend how to run obscure commands in the Terminal or disable this "Gatekeeper" (yes, such an unironic name) feature altogether, which requires some scary steps such as disabling SIP. I could be wrong about that last part, but I don't own a Mac so I'm more inclined to just not build software for it.

> We would all lose nothing and only gain.

It's really not that hard to see how many would lose a whole lot if this feature was available.

If side-loading was allowed and tons of users side-loaded pirated games I'm sure these users would gain, but would the developers? Wouldn't they call on Apple to stop this? I mean the headlines just write themselves: "Apple is complicit and profiting from piracy by selling phones on which it's trivial to install pirated games".

If people started installing random software they heard of on social media, how would the image of the iPhone be changed by the inevitable malware that people would install? "This new iOS virus steals your data and private photos".

What about all the spyware apps that would get side-loaded onto the phones of unsuspecting spouses? "Woman murdered by psycho ex who tracked her every move through her phone".

It takes a little bit more than "it's silly we would all only gain" to make this argument.

I haven't used Android for a few years, but back when I did it wasn't uncommon for me to come across apps that did horrible things, such as completely hijacking the Android UI to display ads or whatever. I bought into Apple's walled garden specifically to get away from this garbage, and I'll be none too pleased if legislation forces my user experience to be degraded.

> sorry teenage me, it's not a utopia unhindered by borders, fueled by access to free information

I'd argue that you found a walled garden inside of that unhindered utopia.

I agree the process with google and apple is fickle and horrible. However,I did read the article you linked, since the social media app was using the mark "clubhouse" first, they would have legal priority. To win trademark infringement cases generally you need to prove there is confusion and priority.

If you happen to later get a trademark through an office, in most jurisdictions you don't get to "steal" those rights. They are quite straightforward to cancel, although it takes some time.

That said, Apple and Google's policies are fickle and confusing and indeed your best bet is to have connections to their companies. IMO google is worse because Apple has a group you talk to, and google has you submit forms to something they don't typically respond to.