[yarcob]

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)

[pjc50]

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.

[nine_k]

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.

[arrrg]

Copying texts is potentially copyright infringement, though.

[JKCalhoun]

Like the icon though, complain and they'll just tweak the text and you're back to square 0.

[newdude116]

Depends. Threshold of originality can be a bitch.

[ygjb]

So can rolling the dice and trying for remedy against a foreign entity already playing unfairly. Relying on copyright protection and courts with revenues this small is a huge gamble.

[xwdv]

Then enforce your copyright. No one will do it for you.

[function_seven]

Would be nice if the company taking 30% of my sales would offer some assistance.

[bryanrasmussen]

I suppose you could do a DMCA takedown? but that would really seem like using a morally compromised solution for good, as opposed to the more normal using morally neutral solutions for good.

[jiofih]

What would be the morally compromised part? He owns the copyright.

[bluGill]

At that price any copyright lawyer will be happy to deal with the paperwork. You were making 2000/month, so the infringement is taking money away. For a share of that it is easy to register the copyright and then send the proper letters. Probably this will settle out of court where apple pays your lawyer from fund the developer would have got and then removes the app. you get nothing directly from the lawyer except that next months all your sales come back to you since there isn't the competitor.

[staticman2]

If the infringing App is in a foreign country the scenario is much more complicated than you are suggesting.

[panic]

YouTube automatically enforces copyright on behalf of the recording industry. Why shouldn’t Apple do it on behalf of their app developers?

[matheusmoreira]

> in no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery

Just because another app works similar to another app does not mean it's infringing.

[panic]

Just because a video has a similar content ID signature to another video doesn’t mean it’s infringing either. My point is that, for better or for worse, platforms already “do it for you” if you’re a record label—there’s no reason why the App Store couldn’t do something similar for app developers.

[anaerobicover]

YouTube presumably does what they do because they'd otherwise be sued by very large companies with lots of lawyers and money. (Whether or not those suits had any merit, they still take resources and are an effective threat.)

Apple is not in the same position: the businesses who would sue them to try to force them to enforce their copyright are much much smaller than it (and are additionally very reliant on Apple).

[paulie_a]

Youtube does an incredibly poor kids b at it and screws over content creators legitimately and legally using something under fair use

[dikaio]

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.

[ChuckNorris89]

>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.

[archi42]

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.

[yarcob]

It was revenue of 2000€, I still had to pay taxes, social security, etc.

But yes, it was still more than enough. I lived on around 600€ side job + 200€ government stipend before I made my app.

[cfontes]

Try Amsterdam, for example. €1000 is your rent.

[kergonath]

The usual course of action is flat sharing. Rent is then a bit more reasonable. In London you could find rooms from a few hundred quid pcm, then depending on location the sky is the limit. That was the most expensive city in Europe, pre-Brexit.

[heeen2]

For a room or a whole apartment?

[jack_pp]

Rooms range from 500 to 800 in amsterdam, I just checked the facebook group and the first post is student housing available for 317 euros.

[fergie]

If you are studying at a decent English university then you are talking €25000 a year just in accommodation and tuition fess.

[bryanrasmussen]

I would think 2000 euro in Denmark would be about a student's living expenses.

[kawsper]

I lived on student pay alone and used student housing, students today get around 849.79 EUR (before taxes) from the government, it was a bit lower back then (but I don't know about inflation and currency conversion).

[bryanrasmussen]

I guess I'm one of those folks who grows up and grows out of touch with how much money other people actually have. damn.

[thekingofravens]

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.

[andix]

Vienna for example. Although it is possible to survive with around 700-900€ per month, eat, live and study.

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.

[ChuckNorris89]

I think we have two very distinct student lives in mind:

The one I know most students have, is living very frugally, cooking at home, counting every penny to not go into more debt, studying hard to get a head start in life and partying hard on a budget, mostly house parties with booze bought from the supermarket with the occasional club or restaurant outing being a treat.

The other one is the Instagram lifestyle student, travelling to fancy places, practicing expensive sports and hobbies, eating out a lot, going bars and clubbing all the time. That's not your typical student, more like the 1%-er.

Living alone in a non-shared apartment is already a huge luxury for most students unless you come from a well-off family.

[parasubvert]

1000-2000 a month is hardly “jet setting” and has nothing to do with instagram. We are talking the difference between living in a shared accommodation and maybe having a small apartment, maybe having a used car, etc.

Plenty of students get bankrolled by a combination of scholarships, their parents, and loans, and have for decades. There’s nothing wrong with it (or with going the frugal route either).

Edit: To live in dorm 25 years ago in a standard Canadian university (for me) it cost $500/month plus another $500 a month in mandatory food card. That’s equivalent to 650 euros. That’s plus utilities, off campus food and drink, computer, recreation, and transportation, probably another 100-150 euros. My family was hardly rich (school teacher and truck driver) and helped out, I worked part time, and took out loans. Things are more expensive now.

[jiofih]

As the other comment mentioned, 2k/month is a starter salary in the nordics. It is near instagram-lifestyle money in Portugal, Spain and most of the eastern EU for a young single person.

A student having their own apartment (and a car??) is already a luxury 99% of the world will never experience.

[parasubvert]

Most students I knew didn’t have their own apartment and car but a few did if they had small children, had social reasons to live alone, or were married (yes some people get pregnant in high school).

They usually had a mix of parental help, loans and part time or coop program work, and scholarships. They weren’t super rich, they were from middle class Canadian families 25 years ago.

I even have a friend going to school today with a rental 5 bedroom house, as single parent raising 2 kids, and having 2 exchange students help out. Between scholarships , loans, and the students from China it covers expenses (well over €2k monthly).

I recognize that is richer than 99% of the world. It’s just my experience.

If you’re coming out of university and making £2k a month that is a bit low.

An MBA graduate makes €90k+ annually in Denmark. This is about the same in other European countries maybe +/- 10k

My point isn’t that some people have it good, it’s that €1-2k a month isn’t exactly glamorous living. The “jet setting” types (I have known a few) are getting an allowance of €3-4k+ monthly.

[tallanvor]

>2k/month is a starter salary in the nordics.

Definitely not true in Norway, it's closer to twice that.

[TomSwirly]

> The other one is the Instagram lifestyle student, travelling to fancy places, practicing expensive sports and hobbies, eating out a lot, going bars and clubbing all the time.

This idea that €2000 a month to live and study and pay for materials is some sort of "Instagram lifestyle" is ridiculous.

[antihero]

Not sure about these extremes. I was a working class student in the UK and most of my fellow students still managed to party pretty hard, just efficiently (Sainsbury's Basics Vodka + Blue Bolt, M-Cat, drink deals at the SU and other horrific student nights).

[probably_wrong]

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.

[Macha]

Student accommodation in some capitals is above €1000/month if you don't opt for a shared room

[chrischen]

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.

[MikeDelta]

Horrible. How did that end or is it still ongoing?

[chrischen]

Not sure if these things can be permanently stopped as in this example the scam didn't even bother to implement a full app. Anyone can just launch something over the internet these days with just a .com domain.

[orasis]

You can submit a DMCA takedown request for them copying any of your images or text. I have successfully done this on Google Play.

[Hamuko]

Can you submit a DMCA request if you're not American?

[fxtentacle]

Yes. But the recipient company needs to be American.

[billpg]

In this case, isn't the recipient company Apple?

[fxtentacle]

Correct. You'd send the DMCA to Apple to force Apple to block access to the app, no matter where the developer resides.

[exikyut]

No, and that's where/why the whole "service provider" thing can get interesting. In this case Apple just hands your DMCA notice to the alleged infringer.

[codys]

Apple is hosting user created content though (in the form of apps). Don't they become liable for that hosting if they don't handle the DMCA request themselves?

[exikyut]

[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".

[boplicity]

That sounds suspiciously like a "union rep."

[shawnz]

Maybe an "app store developers union" wouldn't be such a terrible idea

[jessaustin]

Yeah I'm sure Apple would love this idea and wouldn't try to penalize union developers in the least...

[shawnz]

Sure, but that's par for the course in any unionization effort

[seph-reed]

Totally down for this. Walled gardens should have unions. That seems like a perfectly logical way to keep them in check.

[6510]

It would depend what they get out of it. It wouldn't have to be called a union. A certificate, code of conduct kind of thing would already be interesting.

[exikyut]

Hmmm. What about the second aspect of the GP though? A union is the epitomization of welcome-all/accept-all. I'm imagining something that imposes restrictions on who can apply for assistance, both to ratelimit overall demand and also to make it incredibly hard for scammers to get anywhere.

On the surface (ie, legally speaking), it would absolutely be an exclusive environment. The idea (and probably secret sauce) would be figuring out how to delineate between scammers and legitimate devs.

[michaelbuckbee]

Intellectual property lawyers do this (for big bucks) and Reputation Management services kind of do this (for smaller bucks).

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.

[Jnr]

You can go the DMCA route, they will probably take it down.

[ta1234567890]

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.

[matheusmoreira]

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...

[antihero]

Could you have use a DMCA request if they used copyrighted content?

[majewsky]

I'm entirely sympathetic with your situation, yet I cannot stop thinking "that's just capitalism working normally".

[thisarticle]

That’s nonsense, even the US has trademark laws. They wholesale ripped off parent’s app.

[lisp-fan-007]

Sorry for your experience.

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.

[gman83]

It's literally against the terms of service, so they could remove it for that reason: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#cop...

[coldtea]

And how would they know it's one or the other party that violated the terms?

"Because our app was posted first" is not enough.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

One of the reasons I like to open-source my work (even in “source-available” form), is so that there is clear “prior art.”

However, I have yet to write an app that has been highly successful, so being copied has not been a problem for me.

Seeing the behavior of these scammers, I have no doubt that they would gleefully take my source, tweak the storyboard, and release a clone. They don’t seem to have any sense of shame, at all. Some of these shops have stables of hundreds of apps; each, a minor tweak of other apps in their roster.

It is annoying that Apple gives me a hard time for some small cosmetic detail on my app, while rubberstamping these tsunamis of pure, shameless garbage.

I do get annoyed by “looks like” scams. A couple of years ago, my wife accidentally purchased a “looks like” app that was basically a screengrab of another app (and was approved on the App Store!).

She was able to get the subscription (!) canceled, but it was a pain. Apple also left the junk app on the store.

She was also so unnerved by the situation, that she never got the original app, so it shows that these spam/scam apps can cause a lot of collateral damage.

Getting a refund did not fix the problem.

[exikyut]

Out of curiosity, how do you handle the "source-available" scenario?

Also... I just realized... in the same way the article OP mentioned they were ahead of everyone else wrt features/implementation etc, I wonder if the scammers are ahead of the game in terms of preternaturally staying under the App/Play Store radars? Like, specifically, exactly what might they be doing, I wonder?

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I just publish it on GH, without a distribution license[0].

These folks are experts. They probably know exactly what terminology to use, which screens to optimize, etc. Just because they are scammers, doesn't mean they are stupid.

They could probably actually make legit money, giving classes on the Apple App Store process.

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/ambiamara

[solarengineer]

“Because our app was posted first” is actually what I thought of. Could you explain why this isn’t enough?

[coldtea]

The app could very well be developed before and you stole it from their version control, or copied ideas the posted in their blogs, or copied from their betas.

Or theirs could be available in another store, and you copied theirs from there.

[mwexler]

You post screenshots of your app in progress for feedback. Scammer dupes those, rushes app into store, and when you finally launch, they "were there first" and requests your deletion on those grounds.

So, I suspect Apple just wants to stay out of it, let courts decide based on a collection of evidence (and whomever has the money to pay for lawyers, and time to do all the proceedings), and profit no matter who wins.

[_qulr]

> You post screenshots of your app in progress for feedback. Scammer dupes those, rushes app into store, and when you finally launch, they "were there first" and requests your deletion on those grounds.

I seriously doubt this has ever happened in the history of the App Store.

Scammers are "lazy". The look for the easy targets. Copying an existing app is easier and more lucrative than trying to write a new app based just on some in-progress screenshots, as if scammers would even be paying attention to you before you published an app.

[hmottestad]

Youtube auto DMCA anyone?

[Abhinav2000]

I think the difference there is that they have established copyright - have you done so with your App when there is a potential dispute?

Also a movie or song is a lot easier to determine copyright infringement. But a program might be harder due to its complexities.

But this is just my thoughts, I'm no expert AT ALL.