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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

"On August 22nd, 2013..."

"We were under the impression that Apple would protect us from being in a situation like this. "

Frankly it sounds like you were under the impression that Apple is able to universally and fairly adjudicate all claims in less than 24 hours. That's silly.

What if the fraudster complained about you and Apple acted too quickly and tossed your app? I mean sure your app was there first but in lots of cases the service exists before any app and you can imagine someone come in and puts out an app for foo.com before they put out the official one.

While your case is more cut and dried than most a big corporation is not going to have a different procedure for every precious snowflake. I do hope the book is eventually thrown at this creep though!

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As developers and entrepreneurs we need to be more outraged about this and not start off attacking the victim and just adding compassion at the end of your comment. I really sympathize with this guy, the hard work you put in, the countless hours sacrificed and someone rips that from you. Even if it s for 5 minutes those minutes will feel like a really long time. This app should not have been approved in the first place since it is such a gross ripoff that it is actually theft and apple failed it's developer community here. Every hour that passes this guy has customers having a different product experience and he is losing money. Sucks!

> Frankly it sounds like you were under the impression that Apple is able to universally and fairly adjudicate all claims in less than 24 hours. That's silly.

Well, it would certainly be a good start if they would use their lengthy review process to actually look at the apps. Their employees probably are too occupied judging what is morally appropriate for an adult Apple user to look at.

more likely too occupied combing the internet to find another company to sue for copyright infringement.

I think you're a being a bit disingenuous here. Within 24 hours, Apple did respond.... but in the negative.

A quote from the article:

> The next day we finally received a response which indicated that Apple had no intention of helping us with this situation. They asked that we communicate with the developer and keep them apprised of our progress

I'm not certain of the contents of the email from Apple, but it readily appears that there isn't any transparent procedure. Essentially, they're saying you should sue the company, get an injunction, and turn it over to Apple because Apple isn't going to help you without legally being forced into it.

> because Apple isn't going to help you without legally being forced into it.

As it should be. People don't like Apple being judge, jury and executioner, until they want it done for them.

There are proper ways to do what they need to do, Apple is not one of them. This is a legal complaint with the other developer, handle it through those means.

> Frankly it sounds like you were under the impression that Apple is able to universally and fairly adjudicate all claims in less than 24 hours. That's silly.

I didn't get the same impression from reading the article.

To me it sounded less related to the time it took Apple to reply, and more related to the content of that reply, specifically where they basically washed their hands of it and said (paraphrasing) "you deal with it, and let us know how it goes".

Going from what the author says, Apple have asked that they try to settle it through the third-party developer first before getting Apple involved. But:

> Unfortunately since the developer is acting maliciously and mostly likely without any intention of ever responding to us, we have no way of settling this matter through that channel.

Basically, it sounds like they just decided -- without even trying -- that it wouldn't work and that they want Apple to do all the hard work for them.

I mean, I kind of understand if you're giving Apple a 30% cut of all your revenue that you'd expect something in return, but this sounds like a bit of an overreaction from the developer to me.

A 30% cut is a rip-off and the least they can do is to solve issues such as these.

If I were in this developer's shoes, I would send Apple a DMCA request. After which, if Apple fails to solve the issue, I'd sue Apple.

Yeah, I agree this does indeed look like exactly the sort of situation the DMCA was designed for and that's certainly the route I'd be looking at taking.

But surely Apple does a search of the App store for other products with the same name, as part of the submission process ? Another app with almost identical name and same icon from a different developer, red flag no ?

How would the fraudster complain about a stolen app if the allegedly stolen app had been on the app store for a considerable time before the fraudster's app was submitted ?

It really isn't that simple.

How do you know which of the two apps has legal ownership of that name ? Or whether any of them do ?

It's really not that hard.

1. App released first by Appname LLC

2. App released much later by ENTER MOBILE APPS, a company with a lot of other obvious copyright violations like using the Skitch logo in a totally unrelated app.

Easy. I'll just wait for companies to announce their upcoming app, release a shell fake, and make the original developer pay for the privilege of using the name.

I've received warnings from Apple just for using other products names in the keywords for My app. The person who filed the request for me to remove their app name said that having my app named caused "confusion." I think that in this case, they could move swiftly to warn the clone especially if they are using the same name.

Google pulls apps too rapidly and without proof; just fill a (incomplete) DMCA request and they'll shut down the app first, ask questions later. Thorough research and actual proof are how it's supposed to be, not a half baked DMCA request.

Google does nothing about "cloned" fake apps, just look at this ask.fm clone, for example, which has been there for years and the developer is getting rich from 5M+ users and tons of ads inside: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wAskFM

Maybe the difference is that you actually need to copy the actual assets to be thrown out?

Actually, their Developer Program Policies prohibit "a webview of a website not owned or administered by you": https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html But this is only a rule, that does not mean anybody enforces these guidelines ...

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