I cannot understate how repulsive I find the actions reported in this Ars Technica article. An App Developer made a successful photo app called “A Beautiful Mess”. The app was successful and then a group of copycats began submitting confusingly similar apps with names like “A Beautiful Mess Free” and “A Beautiful Mess +”. In some instances, the copycats used identical icons and screenshots. The article opines how some developers will even grab the code from the original app and reverse engineer it. How does Apple not see what is going on here? If I submitted an app called “Logic Pro X Free” do you think it would get approved?  When someone so blatantly rips off another developer, Apple shouldn’t only reject the app, they should also ban the developer. There simply is no excuse.

The tragedy is that with the approval process Apple has the ability to stop this practice in its tracks. Indeed, Apple is the only app store that can do this since it is the only one requiring approval.  As a community we need to put as much light on this as possible so, in addition to looking for malicious code, Apple also starts looking for (and banning) scummy developers. 

∞