Apple Rips Off Rejected App, Says Wireless Sync Developer 549
Haedrian writes "Apple is famous for going to absurd lengths to enforce its patents and trademarks. It recently sued Amazon for calling its app store Appstore. And it has publicly lectured competitors to 'create their own original technology, not steal ours.' Last year, UK developer Greg Hughes submitted an app for wirelessly syncing iPhones with iTunes libraries, which was rejected from the official App Store. Fast forward to Monday, when Apple unveiled a set of new features for the upcoming iOS 5, including the same wireless-syncing functionality. Cupertino wasn't even subtle about the appropriation, using the precise name and a near-identical logo to market the technology."
Apple may not have ripped this off. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OMG, no. (Score:3, Interesting)
He goes on to say that they specifically told him that the Apple dev team looked at his app and were impressed.
Last I checked, that would make this a derivative work.
Re:Violate the TOS? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Corporate arrogance (Score:4, Interesting)
They did ask for his resume when they rejected his app.
The whole thing is ridiculous. I'm a huge Apple hater but only because usually it's Apple claiming this nonsense *cough app store* but it's clearly an obvious idea that iPhones competitors already do. And his logo is just a composition of the universal icons for Sync and Wifi. (Then again his logo is substantially more legible, so bravo to him)
And I'm sure he used some interesting and impressive hacks to trick the iphone into wirelessly syncing. Apple has no need to do that, they can just add APIs directly to the OS so there is no need to steal his code.
Furthermore, even the developer doesn't seem to care.