Oh my god, they don't even bother implementing the app any more...
It reminds me of my first App Store experience. I made an app that was somewhat successful (about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses).
Within short time, a chinese speaking developer cloned it. They copied the icon (slighlty different color), they copied the UI, they even copied all the text in the dialog boxes. They released the app with a slightly different name.
I contacted Apple to complain about the obvious copyright infringement, but they only forwarded my complaint to the developer. Interestingly enough, the developer actually replied to me. They sent an email threating legal action. I asked them to at least change the icon, and they did. But until today, the rest of the cloned app is still on the app store and competes with my app.
It's not comparable to your case, since in my case the competitor wasn't a scammer, just someone with a very lose interpretation of intellectual property.
But it makes me feel that Apple really doesn't give a shit what goes on in their store, as long as they make their 30%. (or 15% from small fish like me now)
Fortunately making an app that does the same thing as an existing app isn't copyright infringement - that would be far worse than the Amazon "one click" patent, as there would only be one company allowed to make a web browser, word processor, spreadsheet, etc.
There is an idea of "business dress", which can also be protected.
That is, you can make a drink that tastes like Coca-Cola, but you should not sell a drink in bottles shaped like Coca-Cola's, with a red label, and imitating the longhand of the name. That is, you should not make something excessively similar to an existing established thing in order to trick customers into buying your thing instead of the established thing.
The problem as I see it is you have developers that are willing to copy ideas, steal text and other IP. Do you really want to be installing apps from devs that have what appears little moral character? What are they doing with your data once you install the app?
While this is not a country specific issue it would help if Apple allowed its users to block countries they don’t trust to download apps from the start.
>about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses
Just out of pure curiosity, where did you live/study that 2000 Euros are student living expenses?
In my neck of the woods in central-western Europe (Austria), 1000 Euros per month is already really good money for most students and 2000 is what you make as a junior full time employee in a good tech company.
Depends on the city and the student. E.g. Munich is known to be quite expensive. 2000 Euro would probably still be comfortable there, but 1000 Euro would probably require quite some frugality.
At my alma mater (SW Germany) you could live on 450 Euro with the same frugality. OTOH a friend (living in the same dorm!) burned through 2500 Euro a month, that's until his parents started to expect some progress after a few years.
Not an 1:1 comparison, but but in Seattle (US) if you could convert your 2000€ a month to the roughly 2400$ US it is you would still have at least one roommate to be able to pay rent.
Different story in the US, as kids tend to leave home often due to a much lower cultural focus on the family. Individualism is obsessed over here.
Assuming this is after taxes? As a PhD student in Germany my monthly net salary oscilated roughly between 1100€ at its lowest and 1600€ at its highest. That was enough for me not to need any roomates and even save a bit for a yearly vacation.
Wow something similar happened to my business. A fly-by-night business launched under my trademark, bought Google search ads against my domain searches, copied verbatim content from my website including my terms of service which has my address and company name in it, and then also sent me a cease an desist on my own trademark to top it off. Despite such egregious infractions it's incredibly difficult to stop them because their costs for doing this is near nothing. Their risks for doing this are also near nothing (since there's not really any criminal liability). Unfortunately the US legal system doesn't really work that well for small players. If anything platforms are probably in a better position to enforce things better than the government, but they aren't really doing so. Amazon is also turning a blind eye to scams since at the end of the day all money still flows to them.
[Posting here on the assumption the parent comment will likely stay at the top]
What about... a service, that helps walk you through these kinds of situations, handles country-specific implementation details, can help figure out the best approach for a given scenario, and give you the best chance of getting things sorted out...
...and...
...is NOT a "welcome, welcome, one and all" type of environment, and requires Twitter, GitHub, an HN profile, proof of long-term domain registration (eg, Internet Archive history) - the kinds of things that would be infuriatingly difficult for a scammer to successfully clone?
HN is absolutely big enough that "the HN crowd" would use something like this.
In fact, a service like this could theoretically develop working relationships with contacts inside Apple and Google, build a history/reputation of forwarding accurate, high-signal issues, and maybe help to mitigate the current mess of "problem must attract 10K views to be fixed".
This is the case with pretty much every Marketplace out there. Same thing happens with Amazon and same thing happens with Airbnb as well.
What a Marketplace cares the most about is maximizing transactions. Hence, they care about having plenty of vendors and showing good reviews for those vendors so that people will buy. They really don’t want to police vendors too much because that means reducing offer and transactions.
It's not illegal to create an app that does the same thing as another app. Method of operation is explicitly not protected by copyright. Copying your icons and text could very well be illegal.
Still, threatening legal action against the people they plagiarized? The audacity of this chinese...
Its a very difficult situation. However the issue is if Apple takes a view, they open themselves up to legal risk - they are not the court so its not their place to determine copyright infrigement. Rather, if you get a court order stating infringement, then Apple has to take down the offending app.
Whilst yours may be a clear cut case, it is not too difficult to think of examples where it is not copyright infringement or is very difficult to prove - is Signal an infrigement of Whatsapp?
I don't think Apple could have done anything differently, to some extent it is your word vs. theirs and the right medium to settle the dispute is the legal system, not Apple.
1. Register your videos and images with the USCO. It'll cost <$100.
2. You can now file DMCA takedowns. Send one to Apple with the USCO registration ID and a copy of the image and a link to the app in question.
3. Apple will either immediately remove that fake app, or be liable for up to $350k in punitive damages for wilful infringement and lose all DMCA protection.
4. If Apple didn't react a week later, approach a lawyer. They'll likely be willing to work purely for 50% commission, because it'll be a slam dunk in court.
5. Repeat the same with Facebook / Youtube if they advertise there with your images or videos. Take Screenshots and write down the url and date and time.
Of course, one would hope that Apple will do the right thing, but it's also reasonably easy to force their hand.
That said, I don't know anyone for whom app development worked out financially if you fairly price your own labor. So maybe just stay away from cheap apps in general.
Some people want to create great, useful apps. That's what they want to do. They are willing to give away half of their earnings to different 3rd parties to just not deal with the bullshit. It's unlikely to be their full time job. They probably don't make that much money on it, cloning happens just when the app begins to make any reasonable profit.
So dealing with all your described is just not practical. Time is valuable. If somebody is creative and wants to provide some value, fighting with the system, preparing some documents, registrations hiring lawyers etc. is the last thing they want to and likely would rather abandon the project instead. Life is too short to deal with the bullshit.
Not to mention that even if what you said is very reasonable most developers will have no idea. It's scammers (efficient ones) that have to know something about copyright law, DMCAs and so on.
Problem is not that easy to solve. App stores can't spend too many hours on each app because there's tons of them, and if they would only invest time in helping those apps that provide enough profit to be worth it, that would create inequality and also many outrages over inevitable false positives.
That said there are of course many many things Apple could be doing better, especially given their fees. Also I wish subscription based model would just die. Should only be for cloud based services and wherever possible those should be optional. Or at least as simple thing as automatically not paying for months when you didn't open the app (with very few exceptions like storage services etc).
Btw, we should have some attribute for web that marks link as scam/negative. These tweets and HN homepage just made those scam apps easier to find.
> App stores can't spend too many hours on each app because there's tons of them,
In this specific case it seems they didn't even spend one minute, since the app is not working.
If at Apple they don't have the resource to at least try to open every app (I doubt it, they are swimming in cash), they could at least find a way to decide which apps to test first, like complaints from other developers, reviews telling that the app is a scam etc.
I fully agree, except for the subscriptions. I'd say subscription and in-app purchase are the only ways that building apps can be financially viable. A one-time $1 per user is just too little. But at $10+ you'll be crushed by low cost competition. So I believe it is generally impossible to fund high quality apps with a one time purchase on the app store.
But what's the solution against copycats? I believe we should hold app stores responsible for counterfeit goods, the same way we'd punish Walmart for selling Chinese fakes. But then again, we kind of stopped enforcing that rule, too, as you can see with Amazon.
So effectively, the US has become the wild west for counterfeit products and copyright infringing apps.. Except, of course, if you're the movie industry.
Why would a developer be happy to pay 30% to a publisher for publishing, etc, and maybe pay an artist for assets, but not pay a lawyer for legal?
It's cost of doing business. The only reason they wouldn't would be if Apple already sucked them dry with their monopoly rent.
>Some people want to create great, useful apps. That's what they want to do. They are willing to give away half of their earnings to different 3rd parties to just not deal with the bullshit. It's unlikely to be their full time job. They probably don't make that much money on it, cloning happens just when the app begins to make any reasonable profit.
So dealing with all your described is just not practical.
Well, sucks to be them, then, since that's the reality.
Yes, Apple can take the offending app down upon receiving a DMCA takedown. Then the offender can, depending on how profitable the app is, send in a counter-DMCA notice, forcing Apple to put the app back up in two weeks and now Apple is off the hook for infringing, and they're back to making money. Your only recourse is to sue to offending party (not Apple).
> If Apple didn't react a week later, approach a lawyer. They'll likely be willing to work purely for 50% commission, because it'll be a slam dunk in court.
First of all nothing is a slam dunk in court.
Second even if you win you still have to collect and that assumes no delays and no appeals and no feet dragging.
Third it's not like you file and the court says 'oh we can fit you in next Tuesday' (sorry for the tone of that btw but I am trying to make a point).
Fourth, go try and actually find a lawyer that is willing to take such a small case. (ie 'up to $350k' is exactly that. Any opponent would settle for vastly less money. If not they just drag things on.).
> Of course, one would hope that Apple will do the right thing, but it's also reasonably easy to force their hand.
Apple also has a motivation to not create a precedent by settling a case that might just insure future cases against them.
Not saying impossible. But all of this assumes even there is a case and not some legal carve out for Apple (or whoever you are suing) or leg to stand on.
Yes. But you might have to pay extra for them to snail-mail you the certificate.
There are also services that'll do everything for you and you just get a PDF when it's done. Usually costs about $50 in addition to the USCO filing fees.
Even as a "nonresident alien" (meaning foreigner) you can use the USCO website and send DMCA takedowns.
But of course, it only works if you send the DMCA to a company that needs to adhere to US law. So it'll work to get Apple or Google to remove the infringing app, but you probably cannot use DMCA to directly pursue the infringers.
What if you hire a US lawyer? You're still not in the US, but I would assume that Apple is still required to follow US law, regardless of where you happen to be.
It tests every app, including this one. Think about what really happened here.
Edit: Apparently my downvoters can’t think about what really happened here so I’ll explain it.
In App Review this app worked fine. Oh, the keyboard was likely lame and not useful, but the scam screens were no where to be seen. Then the app is approved and placed on the store. Now the scam screens appear.
It’s trivial to do, is done all the time even by legitimate developers, and incredibly hard for Apple review to detect.
It's just bike-shedding. Enforcing names or the fact that you mention subscribing to the app on a website is easy whereas testing every app that comes in is hard.
At least I don't need to pay 99 USD a year for some "review" that clearly only works in favor of Apple (they mostly seems to approve anything from smaller developers like shown in this post, while using draconian and arbitrary rules for competitor apps like Spotify).
Apple users will defend its behavior to the bitter. No matter what you post about Apple, it will either be excused or praised.
Does anybody know of a firefox addon or monkeyscript to filter articles on Hackernews? At this point I just want to hide any article with "M1" or "Apple" in it.
There's a guy who made a script that downvotes any comment that starts with "I mean" or ends with "so..." I wonder if he's worked something up like this.
Apparently the paid for 5 stars comments have been deleted, all that's left are comments in the 1 star range but the app is still rated 4.1/5. It's not the first time I see this discrepancy and makes it very hard for a user to understand who to believe: the 1 star comments or the very positive rating average?
The "more by this developer" app list is also telling. A bunch of utilities, with all of them having in-app purchases, most having weekly subscriptions too. I don't understand how any of these apps passed the review.
It's not obvious at all that one piece of information is completely wrong and another, much more difficult to consume piece of information, is accurate.
A scammy subscription of $400+ a year?! And this gets to the top of the charts because Apple makes more money from it!
These are the instances where the 30% commission (or even the recently announced 15% commission for those earning less than $1M in revenue a year) seems like extortion. Apple really needs to step up on app reviews in terms of false positives (banning legitimate apps for frivolous reasons and reinstating them after social media uproar) and false negatives (allowing scam apps and clones to thrive while hurting the original apps).
Hopefully the threats of regulation can’t manifest soon enough for this to get better for the developers and the users. On one side of the equation you have the developers and users for whom the App Store ecosystem is getting toxic. On the other side of the equation you have two parties making a lot of money for low effort — the crooks and Apple. This is not a good look, Tim Apple and Apple.
(I don’t even want to get into how much worse the Play Store is since it’s a digression from the topic)
One thing I'd like to see instituted is more extensive review for apps with purchases/subscriptions over a certain value. "If you wanna charge more than $100/year, we're gonna vet it more carefully".
That makes sense. But there would have to be much lower limits even on a weekly and monthly basis. How much lower is a bit subjective (even what seems like a small amount to one person may be a big amount for another). From reviews I’ve seen for some apps, it seems like users don’t even know how to approach Apple for refunds when the app is scammy or doesn’t work as promised. This latter part should also be made easier. All this will require additional staff, which Apple can surely afford without having a big dent in its margins.
An app that does nothing passed review? I hope this doesn't happen often, and that the processes are reviewed. May be reviewers have too much work to do and just click OK sometimes to move on?
Also, I understand that the App store has a million apps, and they can't be super thorough with all of them.
What I don't understand is how an app that is actually getting a lot of downloads and reviews, and that charges a huge ammount of money, and that is promoted very up in search, doesn't make it to the top of the "let's really review this" priority list.
It's funny that these scam apps and fake reviews can exist in the app store en masse, while everyone on forums like this one will praise Apple for every heavy-handed decision against legitimate apps (which coincidentally were all in Apple's own interests) because hey the walled garden keeps us safe.
from a user experience point of view it doesnt really matter how much of a distribution platform is compromised, if you reach a tipping point where it become useless.
The only real way to use apps stores these days is to have prior knowledge something is legit
Readit News
It reminds me of my first App Store experience. I made an app that was somewhat successful (about 2000€ a month, enough to pay for a students living expenses).
Within short time, a chinese speaking developer cloned it. They copied the icon (slighlty different color), they copied the UI, they even copied all the text in the dialog boxes. They released the app with a slightly different name.
I contacted Apple to complain about the obvious copyright infringement, but they only forwarded my complaint to the developer. Interestingly enough, the developer actually replied to me. They sent an email threating legal action. I asked them to at least change the icon, and they did. But until today, the rest of the cloned app is still on the app store and competes with my app.
It's not comparable to your case, since in my case the competitor wasn't a scammer, just someone with a very lose interpretation of intellectual property.
But it makes me feel that Apple really doesn't give a shit what goes on in their store, as long as they make their 30%. (or 15% from small fish like me now)
That is, you can make a drink that tastes like Coca-Cola, but you should not sell a drink in bottles shaped like Coca-Cola's, with a red label, and imitating the longhand of the name. That is, you should not make something excessively similar to an existing established thing in order to trick customers into buying your thing instead of the established thing.
Dead Comment
Just out of pure curiosity, where did you live/study that 2000 Euros are student living expenses?
In my neck of the woods in central-western Europe (Austria), 1000 Euros per month is already really good money for most students and 2000 is what you make as a junior full time employee in a good tech company.
At my alma mater (SW Germany) you could live on 450 Euro with the same frugality. OTOH a friend (living in the same dorm!) burned through 2500 Euro a month, that's until his parents started to expect some progress after a few years.
But yes, it was still more than enough. I lived on around 600€ side job + 200€ government stipend before I made my app.
But if you also want to go out, go to restaurants/bars regularly and live in a nice place (not a shared dorm room), 1500-2000€ are way better.
What about... a service, that helps walk you through these kinds of situations, handles country-specific implementation details, can help figure out the best approach for a given scenario, and give you the best chance of getting things sorted out...
...and...
...is NOT a "welcome, welcome, one and all" type of environment, and requires Twitter, GitHub, an HN profile, proof of long-term domain registration (eg, Internet Archive history) - the kinds of things that would be infuriatingly difficult for a scammer to successfully clone?
HN is absolutely big enough that "the HN crowd" would use something like this.
In fact, a service like this could theoretically develop working relationships with contacts inside Apple and Google, build a history/reputation of forwarding accurate, high-signal issues, and maybe help to mitigate the current mess of "problem must attract 10K views to be fixed".
I think what you're describing is interesting as it is sort of a different ground to tread, like a specialized version of the above.
What a Marketplace cares the most about is maximizing transactions. Hence, they care about having plenty of vendors and showing good reviews for those vendors so that people will buy. They really don’t want to police vendors too much because that means reducing offer and transactions.
Still, threatening legal action against the people they plagiarized? The audacity of this chinese...
Dead Comment
Its a very difficult situation. However the issue is if Apple takes a view, they open themselves up to legal risk - they are not the court so its not their place to determine copyright infrigement. Rather, if you get a court order stating infringement, then Apple has to take down the offending app.
Whilst yours may be a clear cut case, it is not too difficult to think of examples where it is not copyright infringement or is very difficult to prove - is Signal an infrigement of Whatsapp?
I don't think Apple could have done anything differently, to some extent it is your word vs. theirs and the right medium to settle the dispute is the legal system, not Apple.
1. Register your videos and images with the USCO. It'll cost <$100.
2. You can now file DMCA takedowns. Send one to Apple with the USCO registration ID and a copy of the image and a link to the app in question.
3. Apple will either immediately remove that fake app, or be liable for up to $350k in punitive damages for wilful infringement and lose all DMCA protection.
4. If Apple didn't react a week later, approach a lawyer. They'll likely be willing to work purely for 50% commission, because it'll be a slam dunk in court.
5. Repeat the same with Facebook / Youtube if they advertise there with your images or videos. Take Screenshots and write down the url and date and time.
Of course, one would hope that Apple will do the right thing, but it's also reasonably easy to force their hand.
That said, I don't know anyone for whom app development worked out financially if you fairly price your own labor. So maybe just stay away from cheap apps in general.
So dealing with all your described is just not practical. Time is valuable. If somebody is creative and wants to provide some value, fighting with the system, preparing some documents, registrations hiring lawyers etc. is the last thing they want to and likely would rather abandon the project instead. Life is too short to deal with the bullshit.
Not to mention that even if what you said is very reasonable most developers will have no idea. It's scammers (efficient ones) that have to know something about copyright law, DMCAs and so on.
Problem is not that easy to solve. App stores can't spend too many hours on each app because there's tons of them, and if they would only invest time in helping those apps that provide enough profit to be worth it, that would create inequality and also many outrages over inevitable false positives.
That said there are of course many many things Apple could be doing better, especially given their fees. Also I wish subscription based model would just die. Should only be for cloud based services and wherever possible those should be optional. Or at least as simple thing as automatically not paying for months when you didn't open the app (with very few exceptions like storage services etc).
Btw, we should have some attribute for web that marks link as scam/negative. These tweets and HN homepage just made those scam apps easier to find.
In this specific case it seems they didn't even spend one minute, since the app is not working. If at Apple they don't have the resource to at least try to open every app (I doubt it, they are swimming in cash), they could at least find a way to decide which apps to test first, like complaints from other developers, reviews telling that the app is a scam etc.
But what's the solution against copycats? I believe we should hold app stores responsible for counterfeit goods, the same way we'd punish Walmart for selling Chinese fakes. But then again, we kind of stopped enforcing that rule, too, as you can see with Amazon.
So effectively, the US has become the wild west for counterfeit products and copyright infringing apps.. Except, of course, if you're the movie industry.
Well, sucks to be them, then, since that's the reality.
First of all nothing is a slam dunk in court.
Second even if you win you still have to collect and that assumes no delays and no appeals and no feet dragging.
Third it's not like you file and the court says 'oh we can fit you in next Tuesday' (sorry for the tone of that btw but I am trying to make a point).
Fourth, go try and actually find a lawyer that is willing to take such a small case. (ie 'up to $350k' is exactly that. Any opponent would settle for vastly less money. If not they just drag things on.).
> Of course, one would hope that Apple will do the right thing, but it's also reasonably easy to force their hand.
Apple also has a motivation to not create a precedent by settling a case that might just insure future cases against them.
Not saying impossible. But all of this assumes even there is a case and not some legal carve out for Apple (or whoever you are suing) or leg to stand on.
There are also services that'll do everything for you and you just get a PDF when it's done. Usually costs about $50 in addition to the USCO filing fees.
Even as a "nonresident alien" (meaning foreigner) you can use the USCO website and send DMCA takedowns.
But of course, it only works if you send the DMCA to a company that needs to adhere to US law. So it'll work to get Apple or Google to remove the infringing app, but you probably cannot use DMCA to directly pursue the infringers.
Edit: Apparently my downvoters can’t think about what really happened here so I’ll explain it.
In App Review this app worked fine. Oh, the keyboard was likely lame and not useful, but the scam screens were no where to be seen. Then the app is approved and placed on the store. Now the scam screens appear.
It’s trivial to do, is done all the time even by legitimate developers, and incredibly hard for Apple review to detect.
Deleted Comment
It's not unique to Apple of course — Amazon customers could benefit from honest reviews as well.
Deleted Comment
If this happens on iOS, what do you think happens on Google play?
Or for some reason if it's a Chinese app Apple will just not bother?
Does anybody know of a firefox addon or monkeyscript to filter articles on Hackernews? At this point I just want to hide any article with "M1" or "Apple" in it.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/keywatch-watch-keyboard/id1499...
Apparently the paid for 5 stars comments have been deleted, all that's left are comments in the 1 star range but the app is still rated 4.1/5. It's not the first time I see this discrepancy and makes it very hard for a user to understand who to believe: the 1 star comments or the very positive rating average?
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/keywatch-watch-keyboard/id1499...
Also, it won’t show comments in other languages, but probably still does show you their rating in the average.
Isn't it obvious? Fake reviews will be deleted, but ratings won't be. So disregard the rating and look at the reviews.
These are the instances where the 30% commission (or even the recently announced 15% commission for those earning less than $1M in revenue a year) seems like extortion. Apple really needs to step up on app reviews in terms of false positives (banning legitimate apps for frivolous reasons and reinstating them after social media uproar) and false negatives (allowing scam apps and clones to thrive while hurting the original apps).
Hopefully the threats of regulation can’t manifest soon enough for this to get better for the developers and the users. On one side of the equation you have the developers and users for whom the App Store ecosystem is getting toxic. On the other side of the equation you have two parties making a lot of money for low effort — the crooks and Apple. This is not a good look, Tim Apple and Apple.
(I don’t even want to get into how much worse the Play Store is since it’s a digression from the topic)
Also, I understand that the App store has a million apps, and they can't be super thorough with all of them.
What I don't understand is how an app that is actually getting a lot of downloads and reviews, and that charges a huge ammount of money, and that is promoted very up in search, doesn't make it to the top of the "let's really review this" priority list.
Deleted Comment
The only real way to use apps stores these days is to have prior knowledge something is legit
50 times LESS likely to be infected with malware sounds like good walled-garden gatekeeping to me, even if it's not perfect...
From what I've been told, they don't even run the apps during the review ("review").