Apple Has Copied Some of the Most Popular Apps in the App Store For its iPhone (washingtonpost.com) 94
Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that essentially copies their ideas. Some apps have simply buckled under the pressure. The Washington Post: Clue, a popular app women use to track their periods, has risen to near the top of Apple's Health and Fitness category. It could be downhill from here. Apple plans this month to incorporate some of Clue's core functionality such as fertility and period prediction into its own Health app that comes pre-installed in every iPhone and is free, unlike Clue, which earns money by selling subscriptions and services in its free app. Apple's past incorporation of functionality included in other third-party apps has often led to their demise. Clue's new threat shows how Apple plays a dual role in the app economy: provider of access to independent apps and giant competitor to them.
Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that uses or incorporates their ideas. Some apps have simply buckled under the pressure, in some cases shutting down. They generally don't sue Apple because of the difficulty and expense in fighting the tech giant -- and the consequences they might face from being dependent on the platform. The imbalance of power between Apple and the apps on its platform could turn into a rare chink in the company's armor as regulators and lawmakers put the dominance of big technology companies under an antitrust microscope. When Apple made a flashlight part of its operating system in 2013, it rendered instantly redundant a myriad apps that offered that functionality. Everything from the iPhone's included "Measure" app to its built-in animated emoji were originally apps in the App Store.
Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that uses or incorporates their ideas. Some apps have simply buckled under the pressure, in some cases shutting down. They generally don't sue Apple because of the difficulty and expense in fighting the tech giant -- and the consequences they might face from being dependent on the platform. The imbalance of power between Apple and the apps on its platform could turn into a rare chink in the company's armor as regulators and lawmakers put the dominance of big technology companies under an antitrust microscope. When Apple made a flashlight part of its operating system in 2013, it rendered instantly redundant a myriad apps that offered that functionality. Everything from the iPhone's included "Measure" app to its built-in animated emoji were originally apps in the App Store.
I have always wondered... (Score:5, Insightful)
...Developers have come to accept that, without warning, Apple can make their work obsolete by announcing a new app or feature that uses or incorporates their ideas....
... why Apple has this image of being a nice, friendly company, when Apple seems to act in manners such as this more often than they do not.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft used to do this to me all the time... (Score:1)
Back when I used to write programs for MS-DOS or Windows, Microsoft would often do exactly this to me.
These days, I don't publish commericial apps for the fat corporates to see and steal from. Meet up with people in real-life and sell direct instead. Don't ever let the big corporates get wind of your little project and they'll have to come up with new features the old fashioned way -- coming up with ideas by themselves.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I suppose that you don't sell very many copies using that inefficient method. You must charge out the wazoo for each copy to make up for lack of volume.
You don't sell very many copies when Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc steal your app ideas and incorporate them into their OS either. Even semi-big boys like Netscape died at the hands of behemoth Microsoft incorporating their features into Microsoft's OS.
Instead of dreaming about selling tons of copies using an "efficient" Apple/Microsoft/Google App-store, get real and face up to the fact that most apps are never going to make many sales. Either you target a niche too small for the big boys to plunder, or you
Re: (Score:2)
...Microsoft would often do exactly this to me. ...
It is not an uncommon practice for huge corporations that have more lawyers than they know what to do with.
Re: (Score:2)
Even a provisional patent before releasing it?
That would protect you for selling your app, and/or making money off other companies using your ideas.
Re: Microsoft used to do this to me all the time.. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile, if you ever wanted to assert your patent, the Big Guys would retaliate by citing ten patents of their own. You would quickly realize that you stand more to lose by litigating than to gain.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Or Stac Electronics, Lotus 1-2-3, Aldus Pagemaker, Netscape Navigator, Palm OS, need I go on?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Apple never really had the image of being a nice, friendly company, it tries to keep an image of a company that makes superior products.
Apple developers for decades, were always on the edge of getting replaced if their App was too popular, as Apple will make an integrated arguably superior version prebuilt into the OS. Your best options are to be niche enough not to get Apples full attention, but make a lot of money, or make it really-REALLY popular so people would want your version and not bother with App
Re: (Score:2)
It could be worse. They could just "buy you out" like Bill Gates.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Well, maybe Apple is the 800 lb gorilla in the app store, but a lot of these inclusions into the standard phone are inevitable. Apple created a health monitoring app. Stands to reason it's going to add more and more human body functions as time goes by. Does an app that monitors periods get an exclusive monopoly of that function? The app developer might have exclusive use of the look and feel of the app and any proprietary technology -- but displaying a biorhythm chart and recording dates and times of a com
And... (Score:1, Redundant)
Is the example right?? (Score:3)
The Apple Health App is all about centralizing data collected from other sources, it does no data collection on its own...
So it would be a place something like Clue would drop data into for central viewing, not replacing what Clue does at all - unless Apple is coming out with a separate period tracking app?
It is true that Apple sometimes comes out with apps or OS features that make the existence of some other app somewhat redundant, but if the app in question has enough features it can still do well. There is still no shortage of note taking apps on the iPhone despite the built in Notes app having quite a lot of features now.
Re: (Score:2)
They're capitalists (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They have a undeserved reputation as being a friendly company.
Do they? They have a reputation for producing high quality, well designed products. They've started making some claims to eco friendliness with some of their recycling programs, but that's about it. Given the negative press (justified or not) about Foxconn and literally everything about Steve Jobs, I don't think anyone has had warm, fuzzy feelings about Apple for at least the past few years.
The Lemon Sisters (Score:1)
Interesting little movie about three sisters. One of which owns a taffy booth on the boardwalk. Business is great until one day they show her family standing around wondering why they have no business. They then notice people already have taffy. Slowly walking around they come up to the front doors of a casino. Where women are giving out free taffy. Because, hey, why not.
Sorry for going slightly off track. I've been bing watching 'The Blacklist'.
Back on topic: This is nothing new. I remember when there was
Re: (Score:2)
Apple must be poor (Score:2)
You'd think they'd go the other way. Actually promote the fact that they look for app-store apps to elevate into iPhone-native apps, and offer a massive pay-out.
How many apps has Apple taken this way, and how many dollars do they have in the bank?
"If Apple copies your app, Apple pays you $3 million dollars. Thanks for doing the market research.".
You'd think it'd drive more participation, a better image, and an actual desire to make app-store apps good enough to be taken.
On the flip side, it's really nice
Re:Apple must be poor (Score:5, Insightful)
This example isn't creating an app that does exactly the same thing, it's adding a simple feature to Apple's pre-existing app which happens to make another app redundant. Why should Apple pay $3,000,000 for "copying" the amazing idea of counting days between events? And why to the one specific company that happens to be extracting the most profit from the idea, instead of the hundreds of other apps doing the same thing in obscurity?
This notion that app makers should have some sort of intellectual property rights to the idea behind their app, and that Apple shouldn't be allowed to improve their own products in any way, is absurd.
Re: (Score:2)
Why? Because it's fantastic marketing for Apple, encourages more app-store developers (which is what they want), and further increases the value of the app-store to apple as a market-research initiative.
And I never said they should only pay the most profitable app. three mil stretches well.
Like ALWAYS, you don't pay people because they did something for you. You pay people so that they will do (or not do) something in the future for you.
Re: (Score:2)
This example isn't creating an app that does exactly the same thing, it's adding a simple feature to Microsoft's pre-existing app which happens to make another app redundant. Why should Microsoft pay for "copying" the amazing idea of parsing HTML? And why to the one specific company that happens to be extracting the most profit from the idea, instead of the hundreds of other apps doing the same thing in obscurity?
This notion that app makers should have some sort of intellectual property rights to the idea behind their app, and that Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to improve their own products in any way, is absurd.
Re:Apple must be poor (Score:5, Insightful)
"If Apple copies your app, Apple pays you $3 million dollars. Thanks for doing the market research.".
If the hundreds of flashlight app makers aren't willing to pay a bunch of money to Maglite, who itself isn't willing to pay the original patent holder from the 1800's, it equally doesn't seem right for Apple to pay the app makers.
If Clue isn't willing to pay... I don't even know who came up with the concept of adding notes to a calendar. But same deal.
You can't claim your idea was stolen when your idea itself dates back long before you were born.
Clue for example is claiming that before they came along with their iPhone app, woman never had any option in any way to track their period.
The flashlight app people are complaining that until their iPhone app came along, no one had any way to illuminate things.
There can certainly be novel software created, but this stuff is so basic and trivial to claim being the idea and concept inventors.
"Patenting *blank* on a computer" is a joke for a reason.
Re: (Score:2)
I never said anything about patents, nor property. I said that Apple would have a wonderful marketing opportunity to encourage more app developers by offering a path to prize-money. I also said that the value isn't the idea, it's the market research of which idea would be popular. You fabricated the rest of what you thought I meant.
Re: (Score:2)
I said nothing of "first". It doesn't matter who came up with it. It'd be nothing more than a way to encourage more app developers. It's prize-money for guessing which apps would be popular enough for Apple to copy.
Forget about any legal reasons. Forget about property. Forget about copyright. This is just a prize to encourage participation.
Re: Apple must be poor (Score:4, Interesting)
What's new? (Score:2)
Kaleidoscope: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] From the OS 7/8 era.
Also, isn't this pretty much business 101? Unless they were patented give the customers what they want most of.
So Apple hasn't copied, right? (Score:3)
...Apple plans this month to incorporate some of Clue's core functionality such as fertility and period prediction into its own Health app that comes pre-installed in every iPhone and is free...
[bold mine]
So, Apple simply has plans to incorporate functionality, not copying as the headline states.
Because copying would mean that Apple has [somehow] obtained access to the source code of this app, then lifted it and placed same into it's OS, which is not the case.
I loathe Apple with a passion but I salute them here. They simple have not copied, period
Re: (Score:3)
It still rings a lot like another company's "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" mantra.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
No, actually they didn't. [wikipedia.org]
First patent application for a 4-wheeled vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine? 1879. It would be another 24 years before e
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
No, Apple got many many pages of documents from a third party interface developer where they went screen by screen to see how they could make their phone more like the iPhone. Not better, not "as good" -- just like.
The rounded corners thing sounds nice to try and minimize what Samsung did. But you know, there were a million ways to create an interface for a fun -- funny that everything looks pretty much like an iPhone and you interact with it that way. This isn't just about grid icons and corners. And Samsu
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're missing the point of my argument. GP said that because Apple didn't copy code the didn't copy the functionality. Your comment only further bolsters mine. Samsung incorporated many design and functionality aspects of the iPhone into their product. But according to the GP, since Samsung didn't copy-paste any source code they didn't actually copy anything.
I'm not attempting to argue the merits of that (those) particular lawsuit(s), they've been beaten to death and argued to the fullest exten
What Microsoft was famous for in the '90s... (Score:3, Interesting)
Was competing with their own customers and business partners. By which I mean developers.
It won't hurt immediately. But over the long run developers will simply not publish on their platform, leading to a steady migration over the Android.
Re: What Microsoft was famous for in the '90s... (Score:2)
And meanwhile, in the Windows world... (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows users still have to download a crappy third-party install just to read PDFs, rather than having it be a stock app. Every time you use it, it has to be updated. Because of this, one frequent Windows exploit is to make your malware install look like just today's regular Adobe Acrobat update.
Re:And meanwhile, in the Windows world... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows users still have to download a crappy third-party install just to read PDFs
Well I use Chrome for other stuff too.
Re: (Score:2)
Why would you use Acrobat to read PDF? There are at least half a dozen better free PDF readers out there.
Re: And meanwhile, in the Windows world... (Score:2)
Re:And meanwhile, in the Windows world... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Windows users still have to download a crappy third-party install just to read PDFs, rather than having it be a stock app.
I'm no Edge fan, but between the appy-app PDF reader that shipped with 8 and the integrated functionality of 10, it's at least *possible* to read PDFs on modern versions of Windows without requiring a third party app.
Re: (Score:1)
Windows users still have to download a crappy third-party install just to read PDFs, rather than having it be a stock app.
I'm no Edge fan, but between the appy-app PDF reader that shipped with 8 and the integrated functionality of 10, it's at least *possible* to read PDFs on modern versions of Windows without requiring a third party app.
Wow!
Glad to see MS incorporated this functionality only after about 30 years after PDFs appeared; but only after trying unsuccessfully to subvert it with their own "XPS?" version.
And let's see: OS X had native PDF read/write since... 1999. (That's since OS X 10.0.0, BTW).
Slow Golf clap for MS...
Re: (Score:2)
Why do you even need Adobe Reader nowadays? Most web browsers have a built in PDF viewer now.
Re: (Score:2)
They all sucked (Score:2)
No Apple apps have ads (Score:2)
Nevermind that most, if not all of the apps they replaced with native functionality were loaded with advertising
Apple doesn't have ads in any apps it produces or includes.
and possibly worse.
Apple doesn't collect user data or sell user data to advertisers like Google does.
Re: (Score:3)
Patents? (Score:2)
Can't developers protect their ideas with patents?
Re: Patents? (Score:3)
You canâ(TM)t patent an idea.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Their idea? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Now do Netscape.
The problem isn't Apple having an alternative function available, it's that the function is a part of the OS and ships with it.
Shocked, shocked to find gambling going on here! (Score:2)
Really, that's the only mention of "shocked" in the discussion? Sir, have you [collectively] no decent respect for the obligatory jokes?
Actually I'm more upset that your [Penroze's] comment was modded as insightful. Yes, patent law and copyright are both distorted and corrupted beyond belief, but the idea of incentivizing the hard work of creativity is still sound. On a deep, fundamental, and theoretical level.
In practice, the lawyers mostly screw over the creators.
Now let me tack and break my position.
(1)
When you have this much courage... (Score:1)
When you have this much courage it's called "copying". When other people do it it's called plagiarism.
Apple needs a recession (Score:2)
The whole Appstore model took off as there was a bunch of unemployed but talented developers sitting at home post the 2008 crash. Same reason why Uber took off. Unemplyoed people who had cars nicer than they could afford. Also in a recession when people were losing homes and cars, a smart phone was one of the few luxuries they could afford.
With a booming economy and full emplyment people have more life affirming things to do than buy smart phones and developers have real paying jobs and dont need to play th
Re: (Score:2)
Same reason why Uber took off. Unemplyoed people who had cars nicer than they could afford.
Tying that to the 2008 financial crisis is a stretch. UberX, in which drivers use their own cars to drive for Uber, didn't exist until 2012.
Re: (Score:2)
2012 was when the housing market hit its bottom. A recession is not a point event. it takes a few years of struggling before people are desperate enough to let drunk strangers into their beloved cars (beloved as they held onto the cars during the recession)
YAY! (Score:2)
Flashlight is a bad example, (Score:2)
conflict of interest? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Look at the GUI of a computer going back to the early 1980's
An office design. Folders, a phone, paper, documents, art, printing, photography, color science, scanning, clocks, reminders in GUI.
Then it was all about the internet, networking, anti virus.
More from better CPU, GPU designs, protection from the always connected internet.
Now health? Fitness? Periods? Ads? Sport?
Now why would any OS company be so fixated on user health, changes to health over
Thatâ(TM)s not how the health app works. (Score:2)
The only data the user enters directly into the health app are basic personal characteristics: gender, age, blood type, and the like. Everything else comes from other apps. Health then becomes the central data repository for data collected by... again... other apps. The data-gathering functions of those other apps are not affected. All this means is that the user will be able to see Clueâ(TM)s output in the same view as their weight, blood pressure, heart rate, calories, and all the other health data
Re: Thatâ(TM)s not how the health app works. (Score:2)
Yeah, but... (Score:2)
On the flip side, there are plenty of companies that make a go of making a better Calendar app. Or a better mail client. Better podcast apps, for sure. Even better camera apps exist on the app store. It seems to me that good apps with non-trivial features have a lot of opportunity on the app store to do well. Apple will even occasionally promote them as alternatives to their own apps. (You still can't set the new apps as default, which I think would be nice, but it hasn't been a dealbreaker for me in any wa
Like Photoshop, MS Word, ... (Score:2)
It's not rocket science.
Good for the consumer (Score:1)
I see this as good for the consumer. Generally, when Apple does this, the result is a product/solution/capability which becomes free, and is done better given Apple's resources being greater than the app Apple replaces. If the app being replaced, in this case Clue, is any good and worthwhile, then people will continue to use it.
I, for one, am happy to see free options to these subscription apps. I understand developers need to make money, a lot of these apps have high subscription fees and with little new f
Does the app store still sell the competing apps? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the 1990s the warning was "your application niche might be a DLL in the next version of Windows" and that, combined with all the other companies they bought, is how Microsoft got the Borg icon. Back then it was much harder to escape/avoid Windows than it is now, such that many people considered them to be a monopoly, and that led to the great MSIE bundling issue.
This is similar, except there's just no way to say with a straight face that Apple has a monopoly. They're definitely large, but also very easy to avoid. If you have an idea for an application, the fact that iOS may come with a competing application is merely a disadvantage, not an absolute killer. But I know people will see it as more serious than that.
But one way I thought Apple is worse (or was worse?) is that I thought I remember from somewhere, that Apple's application store (which you have to use if you want to sell software for iOS) prohibits applications that significantly duplicate whatever is bundled with the OS. Is that still true or am I hilariously out of date? At least when Microsoft competed against developers on Windows, those developers were still allowed to sell and distribute binaries, even though they might have been at a competitive disadvantage. But my understanding is that if Apple copies your idea, then you won't even be allowed to sell your original (for iOS, at least) anymore. (But again: am I out of date on this?)
All that aside, though, I think developers have to accept this. Your idea might also come for free in the Debian repository. Most good ideas eventually get commoditized. That's a threat to some peoples' proprietary software sales, but that's life, too bad. Competition is a thing. Tracking periods is trivial, and anyone who makes more than minimum wage selling software to do that ought to consider themselves very lucky, and for that luck to be ephemeral at best. Flashlight app developers aren't entitled to a market, no matter what platform we're talking about. They're entitled to try, IMHO, but shouldn't have any expectations that user will need their app.
Re: (Score:2)
You're hilariously out of date I'm afraid :)
It is true that they used to reject apps which duplicated the inbuilt functionality - however they backtracked on that a long time ago. I don'
Amazon too (Score:2)
AWS developers are very used to this too. At a recent AWS developer's Conference in Las Vegas, there were tweets about Amazon going full Red Wedding and locking the doors when it came to their turn to present their "innovations". The story I heard from a defector to Google Cloud Platform was that the Amazon culture requires their Product Managers to come up with business ideas every year and targetting known-good business models is an easy choice. They're not always successful, but their size means they tak
tell me an OS that don't (Score:2)
just about every operating system will do this or has done it in the past. that is what happens when you get a popular utility. not much you can do about it except to grin and bare it while bending over.
This has been the NORM forever! (Score:2)
The only interesting part is how Apple will claim ownership of broad ideas and go after those who also have them or copy the idea.
It's hard to define what shouldn't be copied exactly without giving credit or making payment how much money for how long. We won't find something everybody is happy.
Having the search engine or store or OS be able to leverage their position against others is a real problem that needs to be solved. An OS should have been limited from the bundle of tons of crap that it has become;
LONG history of Apple doing this .... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone who followed the Mac in the pre OS X days probably recalls many high profile examples of Apple just releasing an app that rendered a popular third party shareware one obsolete. Even iTunes was essentially that situation.
The rather unique thing Apple had going for it, though, was the fact its users and developers were so loyal. It was already a niche product with a 10% or less market-share, most of the time. Coding for it or using it constituted rebelling against the MS-DOS/Windows norm. So I'd read these blogs from developers who were upset that Apple screwed them and gave them no financial compensation for the product they killed. Yet they'd typically say, "At least I had a good run while it lasted!" and chalk it up to helping Apple products stay great for everyone. A few would even act honored that Apple liked their program enough to steal it.
With iOS, I think more of it really comes down to there being so many millions of apps in the App Store and so many doing rather specific, smaller tasks -- it's difficult NOT to decide a feature makes sense in the core OS and not step on the toes of somebody who wrote another program to do it. Seems like Apple *could* try to be the good guy and offer to pay these people whenever it happens. But like someone else said? Flashlight apps and the like are so basic, there's not a lot of intellectual property of substance there for Apple to steal. Anyone can tell the LED light in the phone to stay lit up instead of just flashing as a camera flash. And really, any one health-related thing you write a program to track is living on borrowed time on a platform that's made it a focus to do as much health tracking and exercise assistance as they can feasibly incorporate without running afoul of government agencies like the FDA.
Re: (Score:2)
While I know Apple did copy a few apps -- I can't remember them right now. If your example of iTunes is your concept of "stealing other's ideas", well, it's not a good one. An app for playing downloaded music and grabbing it off CDs? Seems like that is obvious and there were already more than a few in the marketplace when iTunes came out. So if more than one company releases a music playing app -- then who is the one in a succession of developers who is ripping off someone's "invention?"
Strategically, you d
Re: (Score:2)
Well, technically, iTunes came from Apple's buyout of Cassady & Greene's "SoundJam MP" music player. Apple was supposedly in negotiations with Panic, as well, except Panic couldn't agree to sit down with them and make a deal because they'd been talking with AOL too. The SoundJam buyout was covered by a 2 year secrecy clause but early iTunes users figured out it happened when analysis of the iTunes code revealed lots of strings in it referencing SoundJam.
To be honest with you, I can't remember or locate
TIL (Score:2)
Today I Learned there are people willing to pay money for an app that will tell them when they are having their periods.