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Ask HN: Are Apple app reviewers sharing app ideas?

Article news.ycombinator.com

Ask HN: Are Apple app reviewers sharing app ideas?

Not accusing anyone but let me explain.

I like telling stories to my kid when he goes to bed. Since there are a lot of evening doing this, I started inventing these stories and to keep it a bit interesting I started asking him about what or how would he change the outcomes, and then it struck me. What if I create stories where readers can interact and change the outcomes. So for the past year I was working on this game engine that would allow to create stories and defined rules, game mechanics per game, and allow players to pick their own route through the story.

I finished the app and wrote a couple of stories and registered the app on the App Store. At that point (more then 3 months ago) there was no other app with that name. In that period I sent it up for review, which took a more then week every time, and it was rejected 3 times for the stupid reasons: - in app image text not visible: I used a small cover image from stories, and one of them had this text on a wall in the background - they've said text unreadable - I picked the secondary category for the app as books: I thought that games would be a good fit for the main category, why not pick books for the second - well this was not right again - When I selected the App Store countries I also selected China: they've said that books are only allowed to be published in China if I register as book published there - so I had to remove it from that store, although they said I cannot pick books as my secondary category

After all 3 reviews, which each of them took me around 10 minutes to fix and re-request another approval check, took weeks in-between. The last and final one took 1 whole month, and this after requesting an expedited review 3 times, because no body would answer the feedback dev-reviewer board.

Anyway, I was so happy when yesterday my app got finally approved and it landed on the store. So as anyone would do, I picked up my phone and searched for it. And yeah, it was there, but there was another app with the same name, same idea, same everything (almost). My happiness immediately faded, and I was so disappointed in me, that I did not see it before, but then I got angry. I immediately checked the "What's new" section of this app, just to find out that it was just published, like 2 weeks ago (suspicious). I then went into this developer's account to see their other apps, and to my astonishment, they are all copied apps, and all of them first released 2 weeks ago. I search all these apps, and yes there's another app with those same names.

And then it struck me, could it be that I got delayed for a whole month, while somebody just copied my idea, or other devs ideas while they wait and cannot do anything about it, just to find out they've came second.

With AI being so fast, you cannot compete any more with it. You can nowadays recreate apps in just hours, while the original dev might have needed months, or years to reach the same point.

Bottom line is, that I do not point fingers, but my experience raised some doubts in my mind. Just wanted to share this with you and to ask if anyone had this in the past?

Discussion 1 comments · 2 points · barlutiu · 4h
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