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.
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...
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.
It's not unique to Apple of course — Amazon customers could benefit from honest reviews as well.
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.
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").
How about: it's time for freelance developers to unionise? Some organisation (self-regulating to represent only legit developers) that can put pressure on Apple, run PR, help with legal, etc. (Maybe funded by 5% of the 30% -> 15% cut savings).
Even with my company I would think long and hard if anything is worth pursuing. The extra time loss required and cost means I would approach legal action in the US only if the amount is huge.
I assume freelance developers are even less willing to deal with this bullshit.
I'm a little wary of the viability of suing Apple until they comply. I hope that it works, but the cynic in me says it's far more likely to trigger a ToS update than it is any kind of change.
The irony of the whole thing is that this could cue Apple to “sherlock” it, if it wasn’t on their radar already.
And it still has better paying customers than the Play store, and 1/50+ less malware (according to stats), so more customer trust.
Is it perfect? No.
In comparison, the so-called "gig economy" is also extremely large, perhaps even larger in total dollars than the App Store, but that doesn't mean individual gig workers are doing well.
They build the OS and SDK on Mac too, why do they not get a % cut on all apps there too?
Actually when you're in Safari you're using their OS and SDK too why don't they get a % cut of purchases and software there too?
Just interested why one scenario is considered the norm yet these two others that fall under the same justification seem absurd.
The current states of the "mainstream" internet just make it way to easy to make money making the cheapest content possible or scam. And the company / individual running those are usually in country that keep them safe from any legal repercussion so they can keep doing it over and over again. While not everything is easily fixable, a lot would be better if Google, Apple, Amazon and co would finally step in and enforce their "quality control", make every app, ads, etc, go through and actual human verification process, but that would hurt there margin and it looks like they have no incentive in doing that. They usually have a monopoly or at least a duopoly, so why would they care about the cesspool that their services have become ? Its not like another company can compete with them.
Want to have a real quality app store ? Its not possible on Apple devices and Google make it as hard as possible. Want to compete with Youtube or Twitch ? Be ready to throw a lot of money to attract customer and creator and still fail (hello Mixer) or become a cesspool either way (hello DailyMotion, rutube, ...).
Sure you can try DMCA take down, copyright infringement lawsuit, ... But it will cost you a lot of time and money, which could have been put in your product, and it will be ultimately useless. By the time the request is processed or the lawsuit takes places, they will have already created 10 more clone, push 100 more scam, and other fun stuff.
[0] Google literally allowed a ad for a "one night stand" app that use a underage girl in ad: https://www.reddit.com/r/france/comments/l9y8rz/ya_til_que_m...
2017 - https://johnnylin.medium.com/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-on...
2016 - https://deepakabbot.medium.com/why-is-apple-allowing-a-scam-...
Apple seem to have accepted this as even they earn a lot and are not taking any action.
Just go to top charts paid apps and you will see maximum of such spammy/scammy apps.
Search any utility keyword (Ex: usd converter, etc.) in App Store and maximum out of top rankers are scammers.
It's cute that they have a report button that doesn't work. You can send a billion reports - they not ones have taken the app down.
And even that is problematic, fo you think these scam screens appear for users in Cupertino?
The dream of any free-market economist as the best for the customers!
Refers to the 'power' it gives to developers to soar high on a dragon and wield unknown riches and promise for a time.
Then sometime the dragon coughs, and well you get burned to a crisp ... Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Youtube are all dragons (naming only those).
But I guess these folks have contingencies to create new dev accounts that look unrelated and still come out net positive of the dev account cost quickly.
Unlock keyboard £14.99 KeyWatch - Watch Keyboard PRO £7.99 KeyWatch - Watch Keyboard VIP £29.49 KeyWatch - Watch Keyboard VIP £2.99 Premium £14.99
That's the IAPs for the scam app. If it wasn't a scam app then £7.99 to unlock all the features might be fine. But £7.99/wk subscription is obviously wildly different, and you wouldn't know that's what's going on from the App Store.
I remember that reinstalling Windows was a regular thing to do to get rid of the garbage.
The number of apps with obscene monthly and yearly charges that snag people is too numerous to count and Apple doesn't even police this aspect
Off the top of my head, I wonder if you couldn't make Apple have to pay a flat fee and all revenue made from the scam to the lawyer proving that this is a scam. That would create a merket for anti-scam lawyers, resulting in quickly hunting down all scammers on the platform.
Good to know thats not true. I still have to be vigilant _and_ accept heavy restrictions.
Not some radar or any other closed system, but public lists of sham & shame.
If we want to get rid of mold we should shine a light on it
Many App Store customers literally do not know that they can request a refund, or how to request one. App Store does not even have a clear refund policy. You see a lot of reviews for scam apps that say "I want a refund!" They just don't know.
App Store customers assume, naturally but unfortunately mistakenly, that app developers have the power to grant refunds. They have no idea Apple itself is the sole source of refunds. You would think that Apple would put a refund link in the ratings/review area of the store, but nope.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The app store (any app store) which has a review process and takes a great cut of revenue, should stand for quality and safety. Here, that's clearly not the case.
For another example, see Amazon problems with fake products.
Both Apple and Amazon are large enough and have so much money that you'd think they could spend some of those resources on handling the problem. Perhaps they do, but appears not.
Fuck, if any other company would be able the provide their logistics, I wouldn't drop a dime again with them.
The idea is simply too generic. And it's a feature, not a product.
That's not to say you cannot make money with trivial ideas. It just seems obvious to me that such apps cannot last very long and you have to go with quantity instead of quality in that case.
Hope the he can rectify the situation, and in the worst case, possibly rebrand.
You're suggesting they play a different game because the maker of this game is allowing a cheater to nullify the results of the competitive scene.
Do you see how it might poor form to tell a person trying to be the best in the world at one specific game to simply play a different game?
That's potentially kind of a straw man though. Your suggestion isn't necessarily wrong.
I’ve built an entire business around OS enhancements before, it’s like picking up nickels before a steamroller.
I would think that “1 step” involves accepting a dialog that shows you this will cost $8 a week.
If so, that doesn’t put Apple off the hook (it certainly is a major change from early App Store, when they removed the “I am Rich” app, which was totally honest in what functionality it provided (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich)), but does move some blame to the user.
As I said, it doesn’t put Apple off the hook. Even if they think selling such apps is a good idea, I think that, for subscriptions, Apple should mention price per year, too (I guess they don’t, but am not willing to try with such an app). That might prevent many users who scan the dialog, see “$8”, find that reasonable for buying a feature, and click “subscribe” from clicking on that button.
