The apps don't really matter. I was the Android lead at Gilt and we often talked about open sourcing our app. We ended up open sourcing our iOS one (https://git

The apps don't really matter. I was the Android lead at Gilt and we often talked about open sourcing our app. We ended up open sourcing our iOS one (https://github.com/gilt/cleanroom https://github.com/gilt/cleanroom). We were a company with a thousand employees, most of them not writing code. If you wanted to compete with us, copying our app was 5% of the overall effort, and what would you really get from our app that connects to our (closed source) backend anyway? The upside was enormous in terms of recruiting, retention, and keeping engineers excited. Kickstarter is in an even better position. Their defendable advantage is the network effect of being the go-to place for crowd sourcing.