Apple [pilfers] rips off student's rejected iPhone app
iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo — Apple is famous for going to absurd lengths in its effort to enforce patents and trademarks. It recently sued Amazon for calling its app store Appstore. And it has publicly lectured competitors to …
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple has spent years positioning itself as the strictest enforcer of intellectual property in mobile — suing Amazon over the word 'Appstore' while expanding its own rejection criteria, adding copyright infringement to the list in February 2011 (copyright infringement as a rejection reason). That posture is what makes this story land: iOS 5 ships with a feature carrying the idea, name, and even the logo of an iPhone app Apple itself had previously rejected.
It is also not the first time the company's own filings have drawn this accusation — the 2010 row over a software patent that appeared to copy an existing app's home screen (Apple's home-screen patent controversy) set the template. A gatekeeper that rejects a submission and then ships something indistinguishable raises a direct conflict-of-interest problem the App Store review process has never answered.
First-order effects
- The student developer is locked out of competing: his app was already barred from the App Store, and now the platform owner offers a near-identical feature built into iOS itself, where no third party can match the placement.
- Every developer who submits a novel app through Apple's review process hands Apple's engineers a private look at the idea before it reaches the market — a risk the review pipeline makes unavoidable.
Second-order effects
- Developers with genuinely original concepts face a pricing-and-disclosure dilemma: withhold the best features to survive review and ship a weaker product, or show them and accept that Apple may absorb the category into iOS at zero cost to users.
- The episode hands ammunition to Apple's litigation opponents — including Amazon, fighting the 'Appstore' suit — who can point to Apple shipping another party's branding while policing that same territory aggressively.
Third-order effects
- If gatekeepers can freely mine submissions, app stores drift toward a structure where only features too large or too fast-moving for the platform owner to replicate stay independent — a structural tax on small-developer innovation.
- A pattern of 'reject, then imitate' invites regulatory scrutiny of app-store review practices as an antitrust issue, since the store operator both controls access and competes against the goods it gates.
The trend: Platform owners are increasingly absorbing independent developers' ideas after reviewing their submissions, turning the app-review gate itself into a competitive advantage for the gatekeeper.