recombu.com — You would normally find a story about one of our favourite apps on App Friday but today we uncovered something rather disturbing. At 8am this morning we received an email from Atomic Antelope, a UK-based iPhone app company, asking us if we had heard about iPhone app name squatting...
Oct 9, 2009 View in Crawl 4
judicarOct 9, 2009
<needlessly enraged comment by someone unaffected by the issue>
nintendesertOct 9, 2009
You mean like video game makers that buy a domain name at the beginning of the development process rather than at the end?!
coheedcollapseOct 9, 2009
Yeah, that sucks too. It's not as much of a bother to me if they would keep the place in shape (I'm talking long-forgotten buildings here), but assh**es who just go in and destroy a place and believe suddenly it's their right to be there just because the owner has been away for a month or two. Yeah, that's stupid.
fredfredricksonOct 9, 2009
This is Apple's problem, not ours.
druc3Oct 9, 2009
I don't think it is fair to call them squatters. In domain parlance, a squatter is somebody that obtains a domain name for the purpose of selling it to somebody else for a profit. As there is no way for them to be seen by the people that might want the app name, nor any way for the so called squatter to find somebody that might want the name, it is a pretty useless way to make money. I don't believe that there are people obtaining names just for the purpose of selling them again, and can only believe that people grab names that they believe they will be able to use at some time. Functionally, it is a failure of Apple and their DRM. In order to obtain a developer key, you have to name your app. If development takes a year, it will be a year of that name being unavailable before you see it on the app store, if ever.
leonheart515Oct 9, 2009
No offense but... who makes posters of screenshots?
skellenerOct 12, 2009
Nothing stops people now from making Shazam1, Shazam2, etc... By checking the icon, the developer, the ratings, the screenshots, I think it will be clear which is the one you want. Again, there are plenty of songs with the same name, yet people seem to figure out the right one to purchase.