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Squatters Abusing iPhone App Store

Posted by kdawson on from the not-even-for-the-money dept.

An anonymous reader sends in a new report on a not-so-new problem, one that has had little visibility so far. A quirk in the way Apple's iPhone App Store works has enabled squatters to move in, and in fact has encouraged legimate developers to grab and squat on dozens of app names that they might use some time in the future. "It turns out you can exploit the registration process to gain ownership of as many app names as you like, without any intention of actually writing a single line of code. 'A developer can pretend to submit an app, but abandon their submission at the last moment, avoiding the need to actually create an application, but keeping hold of the app's name. In limbo. Maybe forever.' says iPhone app developer Atomic Antelope, who found that their app name 'Twitch' and its variations were stuck in limbo . 'Squatters have moved into the app store. They're worse than domain name squatters though, because you can't even enter into negotiation with them. You don't know who they are, or where they are.'" The solution seems simple: for Apple to flush all the apps that have not submitted binaries, and to repeat periodically.

6 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. flushing apps by halfEvilTech · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I don't see why it would be to hard to do one of the following:

    1) require the binaries to be present when uploading the app, if you back out it doesn't save anything.
    2) give a 7 day grace period to upload the app binaries. If they are not uploaded by then, you forfeit the rights to the name

  2. Re:Pretty Shortsighted Solution by PrimaryConsult · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Actually a small ($5ish) online fee sounds quite reasonable. It's also a form of quality control, people will ask themselves if their app is truly worth "getting out there" at this point and time before typing in their credit card number...

    Or, you could offer people the option of investing time in it... like you must play a pointless flash game of breakout or minesweeper to avoid losing the app. Next to the "target score" indicator could be a "just pay the fee already" button...

  3. Not short sighted really... by Numbah+One · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Not really. Since an app has to go through Apple's approval process, Hello World apps that don't actually do what the submitter indicates should not make it into the store. Of course, given the opaque approval process and the number of fart apps that made it in to the store, the approval process is not a guaranteed firewall.

    Apple could them flush the "empty" apps that do not have approved binaries, or at least binaries in the approval process, if they have been empty for more than 3 months or so.

    This is just another thing that Apple, and the Android and Palm folks, will have to deal with. The real fun will be when apps are available on multiple platforms, but have different names because of conflicting approvals processes, squatters, and other things that have not yet surfaced.

  4. You don't know who they are, or where they are. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Then how can these evil squatters make any money?

    1. Re:You don't know who they are, or where they are. by Daniel+Dvorkin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Quite seriously, I suspect most of the squatters aren't in it for the money ... at least not yet. IIRC, it was a few years before people realized what a gold mine domain name squatting could be. Instead, I suspect most of the app name squatters are people who registered the name with the intention of making a real app, maybe registered similar names to prevent confusion, and then abandoned the project. (So, okay, they were in it for the money, but it was the money they hoped to make by selling the app, not by getting someone else to pay them for the name.) Similar things happened a lot in the early days of the web -- remember when there was a better than 50% chance that clicking on any random link would take you to an "under construction" banner? -- and to some degree they still happen on Sourceforge, although the system there is set up a little better to prevent the worst such stupidity.

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      The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
  5. Re:not really worse by jours · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Listen, let's not confuse domain squatting - the act of sitting on a company's domain name waiting for them to want to build a web site - with the legitimate secondary market for domain names.

    The former was a big problem "in the old days" as companies were trying to get to the web and found someone squatting on their name. This has been largely solved in the courts now, and few companies are making their first move to the web anymore anyway.

    The secondary market for domains though is completely legit. I buy domain names that I expect to have value, whether I intend to use them or not, and then sell them to others when they want to use them. It's no different than you buying a piece of land and then someday selling it to someone who wants to build a shopping mall on it. You weren't squatting on the land, you just didn't know what (if) you were going to do with it. You paid for it, paid the taxes over the years and then sold it.

    That's just the free market...don't like it, don't shop there.

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