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Developer Accuses Apple Of Stealing His Breathe App (www.bgr.in)

Posted by msmash on from the fake-it-till-you-make-it dept.

On Monday at its Worldwide Developer's Conference, Apple announced a new app called Breathe as one of the new headline features for watchOS 3, the latest version of its operating system for Apple Watch. The health-centric app reminds users to take a moment and breathe. But was it company's own idea? App developer Ben Erez is accusing Apple of stealing features from his app. What's worse, he adds that the company even used the same name for its app. Erez tells BGR India in a statement: We've had the same concept, same spelling, same functionality in the App store for phone and watch for over a year. We built the app because the existing mindfulness apps were insufficient in that they all focus on intense sessions of 5-20 minutes, once per day. We wanted a mindfulness experience that was felt throughout the day in smaller bits.

5 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Moral of the story... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Come up with an original app that Apple is less likely to steal and claim as its own.

    1. Re:Moral of the story... by JediJorgie · · Score: 3, Informative

      For now. Remember that Apple has killed many apps for "duplicating built in functionality." It has happened many times.

    2. Re:Moral of the story... by BronsCon · · Score: 4, Informative

      Those screens also reacted to finger input. The stylus was provided for increased writing accuracy and to prevent fingerprinting the fuck out of the screen. What was different about Apple's touch screen is that it was capacitive, like your laptop's touchpad, rather than resistive, enabling it to track multiple touch points at once (but preventing it from tracking non-conductive objects such as a pointy plastic stylus). An Apple's iPhone wasn't even the first to apply multi-touch to a display; that distinction goes to Mitsubishi.

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      APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
  2. Re: F'ing useless app by robbo · · Score: 1, Informative

    Maybe you should read up on the evidence supporting the health benefits of mindfulness tasks before you write it off as useless.

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    So long, and thanks for all the Phish
  3. Problem with this suggestion by Zontar_Thing_From_Ve · · Score: 3, Informative

    This is just Apple following the model of all platform developers: let individual developers take the risk and initial revenues of developing a hot new app, and then build your own version of the most popular ones to collect all future revenues from that type of application.

    Developer dude's app doesn't run on Apple Watch OS. It only runs on iPhones and IPads. Also, his app is free. Apparently there is some kind of special version of it you can pay $1.99 extra a month for. So yes, I'm sure that Apple saw the tons of revenue that this free app was getting from all 20 crazy people who actually think it is useful and decided that they just had to have some of that sweet cash for themselves.