Pirated applications in the App Store are stealing intellectual property

No matter how stringent the rules were not in the App Store, sometimes in the shop of mobile applications across Apple's not the most respectable developers. Instead of having to create their own programs, they just use the ones that already have slightly changed the look and send the censors in Cupertino.

In this situation, there was also John Lipsky - TouchDraw application developer for drawing on the iPad charts. In his blog, he wrote a story about how the App Store found several programs that use its own development and what came of it. Here is the text translation his articles in the Russian language.

I do not know whether other developers experienced this problem applications, but to me the App Store increasingly across applications, which threaten my own program and my intellectual property.

Earlier this year, a friend of mine - a developer of applications encountered a problem when some developers descriptions of their programs using screenshots TouchDraw applications to present their eppy at best a. I tried unsuccessfully to achieve remove these applications from the App Store, but now the problem has reached a new level.

This morning I received a letter from the buyer «Diagram Touch» application, which wanted to get me to help this eppe, which he had just bought. I told him that I did not distribute Diagram Touch, and should contact the developer who is actually engaged in them.

This is not the first time - and before buyers have asked me about technical support competition applications. And yet, I wanted to be useful to them and sends a link to the website developers. But when I went to the Diagram Touch page in the store App Store, I was surprised that there were no links to e-mail or website developers. It is very suspicious, I thought.

I decided to buy this app to then request a refund to find out why customers think that this is my app. And I was shocked by what I saw - the app was almost an exact copy of my program, except for a few items. Diagram Touch actually turned out to be an application Touch Draw 2 years ago.

It all sample files have been removed to work with the program, but you can find links to us - the developers TouchDraw applications. Furthermore, the screenshots in the descriptions are often very much does not correspond to how things actually look in the program.

Then I decided to find in the App Store some applications that were similar to my design and found a program Diagram to Go, which used version of our app icon TouchDraw for Android. And again I was faced with copying screenshots of our application.

As is the case with the Diagram Touch, I decided to buy this application. app screenshots in the description and the actual appearance does not match again. True, Diagram to Go is not copied our program, and the old version of the app OmniGraffle. But this is, frankly, not very lifted my mood - probably pirates nonweak "carousing" in the App Store - the most seemingly secure app store.

I filed a complaint to Apple for another 4 apps in App Store, which used screenshots of my application in your description. And only 2 months later in Cupertino have reacted to my complaint and began to remove the first pirated software.

We hope that with you such a situation will never happen, but still advise to be on guard - who knows what. A Did you ever have this type of situation with your programs? Maybe you've found an application made a blueprint, as a simple user? Is App Store rolls down to the level of Android? Leave your answers in the comments.