[DonHopkins]

How is that not gobsmackingly obvious to you??! Look at the words you just typed.

There are millions of other innocuous games whose names don't invoke death, men, capital punishment, gallows, prison, nooses, lynching, strangulation, hanging, suicide, murder, etc. For God's sake, pick one of those, instead of "hangman" and "dead man's switch".

Might as well call it "Kill My Abusive Boyfriend".

The whole point is NOT to be obvious when an abusive boyfriend looks through all the apps on your phone.

Hangman's not even a plausibly amusing game. Who even plays hangman on their phone?

How about "Pokemon NO!"

[deif]

I completely agree with you, but as I explained in the article I am limited by Apple's restrictions. I could get around this by side loading the app but then I make the barrier to entry higher.

If you can believe it originally this was a 2048 game (see the android version) but Apple suggested they would only approve the app if it was a hang man game and I named it 'Dead Man'. I wish I were joking. You have to understand that this functionality did not exist before today and my target audience previously were travellers, students, journalists, and privacy conscious people so I'm stuck trying to be relevant to multiple sets of audiences and a technical term that has 'dead' and 'man' in the name.

[DonHopkins]

I'm not sure I get what the issue with the Apple store is. I read the article, and I'm still confused. What did you want to do, and why did they not yet you do it? Why does the name of the app need to have any relation to what it does? There are plenty of apps named things like "Blorg" that do all kinds of things that there's not even a word for. The name doesn't need to be descriptive, it's just a brand. "Pokemon Go" doesn't have any meaning outside of the totally fictitious Pokemon universe. Just make something up like that, like "Glork Zonker Pro".

[deif]

I wanted to release a completely separate app, appropriately named for victims of domestic abuse using a simple 2048 game with hidden dead man switch functionality. For 3 months going back and forth with Apple they told me the app was spam because it mimiced partial functionality of the existing app on the app store that is appropriately named for a completely different target audience (ones where dead man switch is completely relevant).

Apple would only approve the app if I integrated it into the existing app but not with the 2048 game because the name wouldn't match the functionality and a dead man switch app called 2048 doesn't make sense for the majority of users. You seem to be missing the fact that this app already exists with a current set of users already. Calling it Glorp Zonker Pro is not exactly relevant to them.

[DonHopkins]

I still don't understand why the name matters, since you say the abuse shelter or support group would be the ones who recommend installing the app to the victim, and presumably they didn't find out about it by searching the app store for fun sounding games.

[deif]

That's correct, they found me by searching for dead man switches.

[DonHopkins]

I think you're going to have to market this through other channels, pushing the message out to people who would want to use and distribute it, instead of assuming that many people will think that there's a category of mobile software called "dead man's switch" and go searching for it. It's not obvious how "dead man's switch" had any connection with domestic abuse. It sounds more like a really ineffective health app.

[staticautomatic]

"Kill my abusive boyfriend" sounds like a valuable service.

[klipt]

Many people are against capital punishment, even for abusive girlfriends/boyfriends.

[staticautomatic]

Who said anything about The State doing the killing?

[solveit]

Usually, people are even more against private killings.

[staticautomatic]

Maybe. There are plenty of reasonable philosophical positions from which one could conclude that private killings are preferable to public ones and that private killings are perfectly acceptable under the right circumstances.