7 ms·

Apple copies rejected app

249 points by Gupie 15y ago

peteretep 15y ago
So to get this straight: the guy who took Apple's icon for syncing and added a wifi symbol thinks Apple ripped him off taking their icon for syncing and adding a wifi symbol? Who'd a thunk.
- jarin 15y ago
  Not to mention that they apparently tried to hire him.
  - bartl 15y ago
    Not to mention that they apparently thought of hiring him. It isn't obvious of whether they actually made an offer, but I think not.
- tmgrhm 15y ago
  Mhm. And the fact that he produced the first public implementation of this means that Apple isn't allowed to implement their own version — never mind the fact that such a feature requires lower level control than the App Store guidelines allows for its apps (meaning it's exactly the kind of feature that Apple should be implementing themselves, not App Store developers).
  - rb2k_ 15y ago
    I think that's the main point is that he created an app that was probably declined because it used private APIs (or required root access?). Also: he produced the first public implementation of what? A wireless syncing software? iSync on OSX came a while before that and I'm sure there have been quite a few before that.
    - tmgrhm 15y ago
      Mhm, so I don't understand why he expected anything different or why people are so outraged it was rejected — that's one of the major benefits of the App Store: sandboxing and access restrictions of apps. Yeah, as far as I know it was the first publicly-released wireless syncing software designed to let you sync iTunes and iOS.
      - jarin 15y ago
        I would guess that 99% of the outrage stems from the similarity of the icons.
        tmgrhm 15y ago
        I dunno, the headline is "Apple copies rejected app" not "Apple copies rejected app icon". Seems to me that people either don't know how the App Store and its requirements work, or they're just want to be outraged at Apple. Edit: It seems to me that even people commenting here in HN don't realise that the App Store guidelines don't allow for an app to take this kind of access. The icons are similar (despite how shitty an icon it is), but it won't actually be used anywhere other than apple.com/iOS5 as far as I know; for example it's not even in the Settings app on iOS 5. Plus people are forgetting that this icon is just what Apple have used for years as their WiFi/AirPort. If anything, the developer copied — or at the very least, took a lot of inspiration from — Apple's icons for his app's icon.
        jarin 15y ago
        Oh yeah, I should probably be clear that I personally don't think the icon is a big deal, for the reasons you stated. I actually don't think anything about it is a big deal. Someone made an app that should have been an OS feature, Apple rejected it for using undocumented APIs, Apple builds the thing that should have been an OS feature, and Apple haters use this sequence of events as evidence that Apple is Evil. It's basically the same thing as when people enabled multitasking on jailbroken iPhones and then Apple implemented it. Did they "steal" the idea of multitasking?
- dhimes 15y ago
  From the company that is suing over the use of the word "App" it is ironic.
pseudonym 15y ago
I wish I was surprised, but this seems to happen with a lot of OS-extending apps on the iOS device. I've never heard of a game being banned from the app store, but as soon as it's something that Apple doesn't already have baked into the operating system... It's been said before and it'll be said again: Playing in Apple's walled garden isn't a safe way to make a living.
- jarin 15y ago
  I think it's more fair to say that making things that should/could be OS features isn't a safe way to make a living. Or if you do want to risk it, just be aware that you should have a fallback plan.
  - blownd 15y ago
    Absolutely! I develop Mac window management apps and every time a new OS is released I half expect Apple to come and wipe out my product line.
    - jarin 15y ago
      You might have lucked out, since it seems like they're going for the "full screen or nothing" approach :)
    - iron_ball 15y ago
      Just started using OS X heavily at work on a large monitor and started to notice a bit of a window clutter problem. Your app looks like it could be the ticket!
  - ryanisinallofus 15y ago
    How is a to-do app "should/could be OS features?" Or a camera app that uses the volume button? Or Instapaper? I don't think there is an obvious way to tell what Apple has in their roadmap. Specially when they publicly downplay the importance of some features only to implement them later. Maybe they should make their roadmap public? :)
- 15y ago
blownd 15y ago
Ludicrous link bait headline and tabloid trash article from The Register. Apple didn't copy the app, it sound like they were maintaining control of their interests; no one should be surprised by that given Apple's track record. That's not to say Apple haven't copied others apps, they've positively trampled on a slew of third party apps with enhancements in Lion and IOS 5, but that's all part of the game at this point.
- metageek 15y ago
  So, once someone has a track record of being evil, any further evil they do is not worth covering?
yardie 15y ago
I tried this app in the past. It was very....slow. Which is why I think Apple rejected it. Their syncing protocol, even over USB, was painfully slow. Over wifi it was dreadful. Apple has a, "do it right or don't do it at all", philosophy. They seemed to have fixed USB syncing in 4.3 because it takes me less time than before. I'm fairly confident that if he submitted his app after 4.3 was released it probably would have passed, but now that iOS 5 is on the horizon and contains the same functionality it has made his app irrelevant.
- tmgrhm 15y ago
  I think it's far more likely it was rejected because it uses private APIs and takes lower-level access than App Store guidelines allow.
  - yardie 15y ago
    From what I remember it used the published APIs which Apple then unpublished and rejected his app. This is why the story got so much traction in the first place. If it was another developer doing cool things with unpublished APIs it would have been sold through one of the other appstores and that would have been the end of it. It was rejected because Apple changed the rules mid-game
    - tmgrhm 15y ago
      That certainly does change the angle of my story — have you got a source for that?
nphase 15y ago
This seems silly to me. Apple knows its own product roadmap, so why wouldnt they reject an app that implements a half-baked version of a product line they're releasing themselves?
xedarius 15y ago
I think the more interesting story is quite how much money you can make via the jail-broken phone market place.
tobiasbischoff 15y ago
Easily the greatest bullshit i've ever read. This cydia tool was just a hack that activated functions already in place in iTunes and iOS. Just have a look at the 1st gen Apple TV wich had wireless syncing to iTunes since 2006. I guess they considered it to slow and unreliable in the past to activate it for the iPhone, maybe the iCloud concept, faster processors and wireless networks led to their decision activate it in iOS5.
- voxmatt 15y ago
  Seriously. It was always obvious Apple would do this eventually. The kid's app wasn't a novel idea, nor did it have a novel name or icon, it just did something everyone and their mom knew Apple would implement eventually, but just hadn't yet. This app was a hacked stop-over gap to put in place obvious tech. This article is really over the top.
allan_ 15y ago
gaahh, all this apple shit, so 2009
bradleyland 15y ago
Hrm. Dan Goodin. I recognize that name. This is the same author who published an article on The Register with the title "Skype bug gives attackers root access to Mac OS X", which was factually incorrect. He corrected the headline after much hoopla, but it strikes me that Mr. Goodin is a professional link-baiter. The title has it backwards. Isn't WiFi sync a fairly obvious feature that Apple has likely had in the works for quite some time? Based on what I've read, this sync app was only possible because of some low-level sync frameworks that were already present in iOS. The feature wasn't ready by Apple Standards, but Apple didn't want a poor implementation of what should be a system-level feature in the wild. One could argue that the rejection of his app was an act of protecting the user experience. This is something Apple does regularly. If you don't want the protection, you should head over to another platform. Acting shocked at any of these facts just shows that you haven't been paying attention.
- bradleyland 15y ago
  I had a feeling this would get voted down on the basis of it being ad hominem, but in the context of journalism, an author's history of editorial bias is important. If there's some other reason you think my comment should be voted down, I'm open to hearing it. I enjoy hearing contrary opinions.
  - JoeAltmaier 15y ago
    As the author is a link-bait artist, you are an Apple apologist. Which might have cause some impatient folks to click down-vote reflexively.
  - sampsonjs 15y ago
    When I see "ad hominem" hauled out on HN, I always think of the following from Daniel Davies: "There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world."
- 15y ago
scelerat 15y ago
I'm not saying Apple didn't blatantly rip off this guy's work. But. I'm having a hard time believing someone at Apple saw this submitted to the App Store in May and rushed to get it into the iOS 5 spec a month (or less) later. More likely the app was rejected because the feature was already planned. The rejection response was a cover lie.
dbaugh 15y ago
There is nothing like free contract work. This is no different than the way Microsoft treated developers before the anti-trust hammer was brought down upon them.
bengl3rt 15y ago
Happened to me as well... over a year, when iAd first came out, a friend and I built an iAd gallery app. Rejected. A few months ago I saw on Techcrunch that Apple had released their own iAd gallery that looked practically identical. Oh well.
- alanh 15y ago
  I bet the difference is that if you use Apple’s, no advertisers are forced to pay for what are essentially fraudulent views.
sambeau 15y ago
Does anyone here seriously believe that anyone in the Apple department responsible for Wifi Syncing will have ever seen this app and its icon? Apple will have been working on Wifi syncing far longer ago than last May. I wouldn't be surprised if they had it working when they first launched the iPhone but held it back for other sensible reasons (not everyone had wifi, power usage, speed, reliability, no delta updates etc). Like Authors are warned by their lawyers not to read or accept fan fiction, Apple's developers will be kept well away from reviewing of apps. The concept is an obvious one; one that has had much discussion on the internet and on this site in particular. The icon is the most obvious and clearest solution you can draw. I spend most of my day drawing icons and if you had asked me to create an icon for this I am 100% certain that I would have put a wifi logo into the middle of a sync logo. It is a completely obvious thing to do looking at the respective shapes and line thicknesses. This is a non story.
alanh 15y ago
1. The idea of wireless sync is so obvious that customers have been asking for it since, oh, half a decade ago when iPhone was introduced. 2. The icon, while similar in concept, is literally nothing more than Apple’s standard “sync” icon plus Apple’s standard AirPort (Wifi) icon. 3. (Bonus) After rejecting the app, which did perform activities not allowed in the SDK, Apple expressed interest in hiring the kid anyway. Manufactured controversy. Snore.
- ugh 15y ago
  People have been asking for wireless sync for the last decade. Does nobody remember the immortal “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.”? That was written in 2001 about the first iPod. (The actual introduction of wireless sync nearly a decade later has been pretty anticlimactic. Apple took so long that no one is anymore very impressed or surprised. I think that it was about 2006 when everyone started believing that wireless sync would be the next big thing for iPods but then came the iPhone.)
nhannah 15y ago
Apple is setting themselves up for a Microsoft style lawsuit in the future. Everyone here seems very defensive of apple, and while I think a review policy does help a lot at keeping bad apps out, a move like this could easily be brought to court with a huge settlement having to come from apple. Actually trying to hire the guy could look pretty bad on them as it could be construed as trying to avoid a possible suit.
shinratdr 15y ago
As a purchaser of Wi-Fi Sync, fuck him. He's an extremely unprofessional developer who provides terrible customer service. Don't buy his app, even at $2.99. He dropped off the map after promising a Windows beta for WiFi Sync 2, he won't refund purchases for any reason, and he used misleading language that he refuses to own up to when promising sync over 3G. Apple's implementation will be way better anyways. It's already much faster and it syncs in the background over USB.
Osiris 15y ago
In cases like this, do developers have any legal grounds to sue? Would the developer had to have patented some of the technology to gain a legal basis for a suit? If Apple can claim it was a clean-room implementation copying the same functionality, I assume he's just out of luck?

249 points by Gupie 15y ago

So to get this straight: the guy who took Apple's icon for syncing and added a wifi symbol thinks Apple ripped him off taking their icon for syncing and adding a wifi symbol? Who'd a thunk.

jarin 15y ago
Not to mention that they apparently tried to hire him.
- bartl 15y ago
  Not to mention that they apparently thought of hiring him. It isn't obvious of whether they actually made an offer, but I think not.
tmgrhm 15y ago
Mhm. And the fact that he produced the first public implementation of this means that Apple isn't allowed to implement their own version — never mind the fact that such a feature requires lower level control than the App Store guidelines allows for its apps (meaning it's exactly the kind of feature that Apple should be implementing themselves, not App Store developers).
- rb2k_ 15y ago
  I think that's the main point is that he created an app that was probably declined because it used private APIs (or required root access?). Also: he produced the first public implementation of what? A wireless syncing software? iSync on OSX came a while before that and I'm sure there have been quite a few before that.
  - tmgrhm 15y ago
    Mhm, so I don't understand why he expected anything different or why people are so outraged it was rejected — that's one of the major benefits of the App Store: sandboxing and access restrictions of apps. Yeah, as far as I know it was the first publicly-released wireless syncing software designed to let you sync iTunes and iOS.
    - jarin 15y ago
      I would guess that 99% of the outrage stems from the similarity of the icons.
      - tmgrhm 15y ago
        I dunno, the headline is "Apple copies rejected app" not "Apple copies rejected app icon". Seems to me that people either don't know how the App Store and its requirements work, or they're just want to be outraged at Apple. Edit: It seems to me that even people commenting here in HN don't realise that the App Store guidelines don't allow for an app to take this kind of access. The icons are similar (despite how shitty an icon it is), but it won't actually be used anywhere other than apple.com/iOS5 as far as I know; for example it's not even in the Settings app on iOS 5. Plus people are forgetting that this icon is just what Apple have used for years as their WiFi/AirPort. If anything, the developer copied — or at the very least, took a lot of inspiration from — Apple's icons for his app's icon.
        jarin 15y ago
        Oh yeah, I should probably be clear that I personally don't think the icon is a big deal, for the reasons you stated. I actually don't think anything about it is a big deal. Someone made an app that should have been an OS feature, Apple rejected it for using undocumented APIs, Apple builds the thing that should have been an OS feature, and Apple haters use this sequence of events as evidence that Apple is Evil. It's basically the same thing as when people enabled multitasking on jailbroken iPhones and then Apple implemented it. Did they "steal" the idea of multitasking?
dhimes 15y ago
From the company that is suing over the use of the word "App" it is ironic.

pseudonym 15y ago

I wish I was surprised, but this seems to happen with a lot of OS-extending apps on the iOS device. I've never heard of a game being banned from the app store, but as soon as it's something that Apple doesn't already have baked into the operating system... It's been said before and it'll be said again: Playing in Apple's walled garden isn't a safe way to make a living.

jarin 15y ago
I think it's more fair to say that making things that should/could be OS features isn't a safe way to make a living. Or if you do want to risk it, just be aware that you should have a fallback plan.
- blownd 15y ago
  Absolutely! I develop Mac window management apps and every time a new OS is released I half expect Apple to come and wipe out my product line.
  - jarin 15y ago
    You might have lucked out, since it seems like they're going for the "full screen or nothing" approach :)
  - iron_ball 15y ago
    Just started using OS X heavily at work on a large monitor and started to notice a bit of a window clutter problem. Your app looks like it could be the ticket!
- ryanisinallofus 15y ago
  How is a to-do app "should/could be OS features?" Or a camera app that uses the volume button? Or Instapaper? I don't think there is an obvious way to tell what Apple has in their roadmap. Specially when they publicly downplay the importance of some features only to implement them later. Maybe they should make their roadmap public? :)
15y ago

blownd 15y ago

Ludicrous link bait headline and tabloid trash article from The Register. Apple didn't copy the app, it sound like they were maintaining control of their interests; no one should be surprised by that given Apple's track record. That's not to say Apple haven't copied others apps, they've positively trampled on a slew of third party apps with enhancements in Lion and IOS 5, but that's all part of the game at this point.

metageek 15y ago
So, once someone has a track record of being evil, any further evil they do is not worth covering?

yardie 15y ago

I tried this app in the past. It was very....slow. Which is why I think Apple rejected it. Their syncing protocol, even over USB, was painfully slow. Over wifi it was dreadful. Apple has a, "do it right or don't do it at all", philosophy. They seemed to have fixed USB syncing in 4.3 because it takes me less time than before. I'm fairly confident that if he submitted his app after 4.3 was released it probably would have passed, but now that iOS 5 is on the horizon and contains the same functionality it has made his app irrelevant.

tmgrhm 15y ago
I think it's far more likely it was rejected because it uses private APIs and takes lower-level access than App Store guidelines allow.
- yardie 15y ago
  From what I remember it used the published APIs which Apple then unpublished and rejected his app. This is why the story got so much traction in the first place. If it was another developer doing cool things with unpublished APIs it would have been sold through one of the other appstores and that would have been the end of it. It was rejected because Apple changed the rules mid-game
  - tmgrhm 15y ago
    That certainly does change the angle of my story — have you got a source for that?

nphase 15y ago

This seems silly to me. Apple knows its own product roadmap, so why wouldnt they reject an app that implements a half-baked version of a product line they're releasing themselves?

xedarius 15y ago

I think the more interesting story is quite how much money you can make via the jail-broken phone market place.

tobiasbischoff 15y ago

Easily the greatest bullshit i've ever read. This cydia tool was just a hack that activated functions already in place in iTunes and iOS. Just have a look at the 1st gen Apple TV wich had wireless syncing to iTunes since 2006. I guess they considered it to slow and unreliable in the past to activate it for the iPhone, maybe the iCloud concept, faster processors and wireless networks led to their decision activate it in iOS5.

voxmatt 15y ago
Seriously. It was always obvious Apple would do this eventually. The kid's app wasn't a novel idea, nor did it have a novel name or icon, it just did something everyone and their mom knew Apple would implement eventually, but just hadn't yet. This app was a hacked stop-over gap to put in place obvious tech. This article is really over the top.

allan_ 15y ago

gaahh, all this apple shit, so 2009

bradleyland 15y ago

Hrm. Dan Goodin. I recognize that name. This is the same author who published an article on The Register with the title "Skype bug gives attackers root access to Mac OS X", which was factually incorrect. He corrected the headline after much hoopla, but it strikes me that Mr. Goodin is a professional link-baiter. The title has it backwards. Isn't WiFi sync a fairly obvious feature that Apple has likely had in the works for quite some time? Based on what I've read, this sync app was only possible because of some low-level sync frameworks that were already present in iOS. The feature wasn't ready by Apple Standards, but Apple didn't want a poor implementation of what should be a system-level feature in the wild. One could argue that the rejection of his app was an act of protecting the user experience. This is something Apple does regularly. If you don't want the protection, you should head over to another platform. Acting shocked at any of these facts just shows that you haven't been paying attention.

bradleyland 15y ago
I had a feeling this would get voted down on the basis of it being ad hominem, but in the context of journalism, an author's history of editorial bias is important. If there's some other reason you think my comment should be voted down, I'm open to hearing it. I enjoy hearing contrary opinions.
- JoeAltmaier 15y ago
  As the author is a link-bait artist, you are an Apple apologist. Which might have cause some impatient folks to click down-vote reflexively.
- sampsonjs 15y ago
  When I see "ad hominem" hauled out on HN, I always think of the following from Daniel Davies: "There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of "argumentum ad hominem". There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of "giving known liars the benefit of the doubt", but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world."
15y ago

scelerat 15y ago

I'm not saying Apple didn't blatantly rip off this guy's work. But. I'm having a hard time believing someone at Apple saw this submitted to the App Store in May and rushed to get it into the iOS 5 spec a month (or less) later. More likely the app was rejected because the feature was already planned. The rejection response was a cover lie.

dbaugh 15y ago

There is nothing like free contract work. This is no different than the way Microsoft treated developers before the anti-trust hammer was brought down upon them.

bengl3rt 15y ago

Happened to me as well... over a year, when iAd first came out, a friend and I built an iAd gallery app. Rejected. A few months ago I saw on Techcrunch that Apple had released their own iAd gallery that looked practically identical. Oh well.

alanh 15y ago
I bet the difference is that if you use Apple’s, no advertisers are forced to pay for what are essentially fraudulent views.

sambeau 15y ago

Does anyone here seriously believe that anyone in the Apple department responsible for Wifi Syncing will have ever seen this app and its icon? Apple will have been working on Wifi syncing far longer ago than last May. I wouldn't be surprised if they had it working when they first launched the iPhone but held it back for other sensible reasons (not everyone had wifi, power usage, speed, reliability, no delta updates etc). Like Authors are warned by their lawyers not to read or accept fan fiction, Apple's developers will be kept well away from reviewing of apps. The concept is an obvious one; one that has had much discussion on the internet and on this site in particular. The icon is the most obvious and clearest solution you can draw. I spend most of my day drawing icons and if you had asked me to create an icon for this I am 100% certain that I would have put a wifi logo into the middle of a sync logo. It is a completely obvious thing to do looking at the respective shapes and line thicknesses. This is a non story.

alanh 15y ago

1. The idea of wireless sync is so obvious that customers have been asking for it since, oh, half a decade ago when iPhone was introduced. 2. The icon, while similar in concept, is literally nothing more than Apple’s standard “sync” icon plus Apple’s standard AirPort (Wifi) icon. 3. (Bonus) After rejecting the app, which did perform activities not allowed in the SDK, Apple expressed interest in hiring the kid anyway. Manufactured controversy. Snore.

ugh 15y ago
People have been asking for wireless sync for the last decade. Does nobody remember the immortal “No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.”? That was written in 2001 about the first iPod. (The actual introduction of wireless sync nearly a decade later has been pretty anticlimactic. Apple took so long that no one is anymore very impressed or surprised. I think that it was about 2006 when everyone started believing that wireless sync would be the next big thing for iPods but then came the iPhone.)

nhannah 15y ago

Apple is setting themselves up for a Microsoft style lawsuit in the future. Everyone here seems very defensive of apple, and while I think a review policy does help a lot at keeping bad apps out, a move like this could easily be brought to court with a huge settlement having to come from apple. Actually trying to hire the guy could look pretty bad on them as it could be construed as trying to avoid a possible suit.

shinratdr 15y ago

As a purchaser of Wi-Fi Sync, fuck him. He's an extremely unprofessional developer who provides terrible customer service. Don't buy his app, even at $2.99. He dropped off the map after promising a Windows beta for WiFi Sync 2, he won't refund purchases for any reason, and he used misleading language that he refuses to own up to when promising sync over 3G. Apple's implementation will be way better anyways. It's already much faster and it syncs in the background over USB.

Osiris 15y ago

In cases like this, do developers have any legal grounds to sue? Would the developer had to have patented some of the technology to gain a legal basis for a suit? If Apple can claim it was a clean-room implementation copying the same functionality, I assume he's just out of luck?