Apple Bans the Word 'Android' From App Store

http://www.pcworld.com/article/188696/apple_bans_the_word_android_from_app_store.html/

by Tichy • 16 years ago

76 55 16 years ago

pcworld.com

mattfitzgerald• 16 years ago

Currently deciding whether to buy an iPhone or an android phone. This has made the decision easy - android all the way.

zitterbewegung• 16 years ago

App stores are generally broken because you can have the ability to ban things. We should have an open appstore.

Mark_B• 16 years ago

"He who controls the Spice controls the universe"

litewulf• 16 years ago

OR allow people to install things by means other than the appstore.

cookiecaper• 16 years ago

You can install Android apps from anywhere.

EDIT: See http://en.androidwiki.com/wiki/Applications

nuclear_eclipse• 16 years ago

Except with Android, you're free to distribute or install applications through alternate apparently stores, or directly through the internet with .apk files. If Apple allowed that on the iPhone, nobody would care if they banned something from their "blessed" channel...

Zak• 16 years ago

The mechanism of banning apps is useful so that users can have a trusted place to get apps known to be free of malware.

The way to make sure that mechanism doesn't result in evil policy is to allow an alternate means of installing software. Google does this. Apple does not.

joeyo• 16 years ago

There are a couple of alternative app stores for Android (I'm not sure what would make them "open", they're certainly more open than the Apple one, but that goes for the official Google Market, too. Here are the ones that I know of for android:

* http://slideme.org/

* http://mikandi.com/ [adult]

* http://www.handango.com/

* http://onlyandroid.mobihand.com/

sjs• 16 years ago

As someone who currently has an iPhone, you made the right decision. I love my iPhone, but sometimes it feels too much like Apple's iPhone rather than my iPhone. Android for me next.

blub• 16 years ago

You're ok with the AppStore and the Apple policies in general, but when they forbid one guy from using the Android tm in an app suddenly Apple becomes the bad guy?

I don't like Apple at all, but your decision process seems incorrect.

johnsea• 16 years ago

Most/lots of people probably _aren't_ ok with Apple policies but accept it pragmatically because the device and the apps are that good. Now with alternatives at hand (Android/Palm Pre) and policies getting worse it's very understandable that there is a point people say: enough!

bad_user• 16 years ago

I saw a Nexus One the other day on one of my colleagues ... it's pretty awesome. Has aprox. the same size as an iPhone, and the apps are really OK.

The only thing missing is multi-touch because of Apple's patent, but I didn't saw much of a difference ... and apparently you can activate multi-touch support.

It's a pretty cool phone ... if iPhone wasn't the first to come out, the Nexus One would be an instant hit. Unfortunately being as good as the iPhone is not enough, but its real strength will be its openness ... for example you can install Flash on it :)

surfmike• 16 years ago

Multitouch support was added with this week's update.

simanyay• 16 years ago

Can't wait for Apple banning apps because their developers use GMail.

ryanwaggoner2• 16 years ago

Apple does have something of a weird relationship with Google at the moment...Gmail is one of the email providers on the iPhone with "express" setup, and they have pre-installed apps for Google Maps and Youtube. On the other hand, Android. Seems like a perfect opportunity for MSFT.

snprbob86• 16 years ago

To be fair, Gmail's express setup is somewhat unsanctioned. Gmail's documentation explicitly advises against the use of that express setup button:

    What if I tap 'Gmail' instead? 
    Archiving and deleting messages will work differently. Our instructions ensure Gmail works as designed.

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answe...

pbz• 16 years ago

I guess MSFT doesn't have a mobile operating system...

tszming• 16 years ago

evil

electromagnetic• 16 years ago

vs good!

chanux• 16 years ago

My gut feeling

Google vs Apple: Whoever wins, we lose.

But about android phones, it's more freer than iPhone anyway.

ryanwaggoner2• 16 years ago

It's hard to understand how an organization as savvy as Apple could do something like this. What do they really think they're going to get out of it, other than bad press? I'm not even saying that the tradeoffs aren't worth it, but that there's no upside at all. What possible benefit could this have?

techiferous2• 16 years ago

"What possible benefit could this have?"

I was wondering this, too. Perhaps Apple has a policy of avoiding mentioning other platforms because it could confuse the end user. Remember that many people don't even know the difference between a browser and a search engine.

pyre4• 16 years ago

He was only mentioning a competing platform in a manor of speaking. Someone that doesn't know what Android is would just know that his app was a finalist in a competition, no?

9oliYQjP3• 16 years ago

Actually it's really simple to understand. Last time I checked, Google had a trademark on the word Android. An integral part of trying to assert a trademark is enforcing certain usages. Otherwise people start calling all similar products by your product's name (e.g., paper tissues become Kleenex) and you lose that trademark.

From Google themselves (http://www.google.com/permissions/guidelines.html):

"One of the conditions for all uses is that you can't mess around with our marks. Only we get to do that. Don’t remove, distort or alter any element of a Google Brand Feature. That includes modifying a Google trademark, for example, through hyphenation, combination or abbreviation, such as: Googliscious, Googlyoogly, GaGooglemania. Do not shorten, abbreviate, or create acronyms out of Google trademarks"

...

"Don’t incorporate Google Brand Features into your own product name, service names, trademarks, logos, or company names."

My money is on either Apple's lawyers or Google's lawyers coming up with this policy. I know it's en vogue to jump on Google as the knight in shining armour and Apple as the villain, but let's not jump to conclusions here.

statictype• 16 years ago

>My money is on either Apple's lawyers or Google's lawyers coming up with this policy. I know it's en vogue to jump on Google as the knight in shining armour and Apple as the villain, but let's not jump to conclusions here.

Absurd. Do you really believe Apple's lawyers and appstore inspectors are there to protect the developers from potential trademark infringement lawsuits? It's not Apple that is violating any trademark here, it's the developer. This is just pettiness on the part of Apple. They certainly have a right to ban any mention of competitor products and thats exactly what they've done.

alex_c• 16 years ago

I'm not convinced - if you read the email, the word trademark isn't mentioned once (I've had an app rejected for trademark infringement ). Not being allowed to mention being a finalist in a competition? Come on...

The funny thing is, even as a trademark thing this doesn't make sense, strategically. Let Google sue for something like this, and they look like the bad guys, not Apple.

Ah well... mysterious are the ways of Apple.

pyre4• 16 years ago

Did you read the article though?

> During our review of your application, we found that your application contains inappropriate or irrelevant platform information in the Application Description and/or Release Notes sections

This seems to me more like a "Thou shalt not mention a competing platform" rule than a "We're covering our asses from lawsuits" rule. I mean the guy was only mentioning that he had been a finalist in Google's "Android Developer Challenge." Are you going to tell me that Google can sue someone for trademark infringement over that?

I could see if he was pimping another platform like, "Hey! This app is available for Android too!" Maybe in that case Apple wouldn't want him advertising another platform, but even that doesn't make sense. They only people that are viewing his App's description are people that have an iPhone, right? So why would they care about Android compatibility? It's not likely someone would drop their iPhone and rush out to buy an Android phone over a single App.

buster2• 16 years ago

I'm no lawyer, but i think the apple developer would be sued and not apple. So it's definitely a bad excuse. The appstore is merely the application that displays it, but you don't see MS sued when some webpage shows a trademark infrignement in the Internet Explorer, do you?

amcl• 16 years ago

I question the validity and enforceability of a trademark on the word Android anyway. Google neither coined the word or were the first to use it in a technical sense. Android had a pre-existing meaning and in your example maps to paper tissue not the coined product descriptor Kleenex.

st3fan• 16 years ago

Hey, it is their store ... whatever they want.

pyre4• 16 years ago

Does that mean that we have to approve of what they do? I don't think that anyone is claiming that they don't have the 'right' to do it.

Que• 16 years ago

Well can you blame Apple?.. they didn't want to have their infallible image tarnished by having an top ADC app advertising that it was designed for a competing platform. [/sarcasm]

Boo

marshallp• 16 years ago

i think steve jobs does these kinds of these things just to get press - it doesn't matter if they're percieved evil or good - poeple will love him and buy his products anyway

qjz• 16 years ago

The title of the article is misleading. It's not like they rejected a game named "Android Apocalypse." Why should they host any content that promotes another platform?

lt• 16 years ago

The application in question has not even been rejected, much less mass banning of apps that contain the word happened. They just suggested not to mention the competitor's platform:

While your application has not been rejected, it would be appropriate to remove 'Finalist in Google's Android Developer's Challenge!' from the Application Description

I can understand why that would be appropriate. Most users would have no idea what Google's Android Developer's Challenge is: "How do I download the other finalist apps?" "I bought this application that says it's Android - how do I run it in my wife's Nexus One?".

Not to mention the courtesy of not promoting competitors products in one vendor's own turf.

This is a huge overreaction by the PCWorld editor to linkbait you all. Even the application author thought it was reasonable. I'm surprised no one had picked up on this yet.

patio11• 16 years ago

Not to mention the courtesy of not promoting competitors products in one vendor's own turf.

I remember a time when it was widely believed that a large technology company being able to dictate what firms had access to its market was something akin to it being the bastard child of Ma Bell and Hitler.

donaq2• 16 years ago

While I agree that the article title was linkbait, I think the author had a valid point in noting that mentioning that the app was a finalist in a big competition does help in vouching for the app's usefulness. This isn't something that Apple should be discouraging, and the fact that they do does make them seem, well, petty.

9oliYQjP3• 16 years ago

The app wasn't a finalist. You can't enter an iPhone app in an Android competition. Logic like this is what makes people think Microsoft Office for Mac is as full featured as Microsoft Office on Windows. They're too very different products with different codebases and functionality that attempt to mimic some behaviour between each other. Have you seen the frustration of an Office:Mac user when they realize, for instance, that they can't do something simple like get Entourage to work with an Exchange server or get Office to connect to Sharepoint?

fauigerzigerk• 16 years ago

Mentioning a competitor's developer contest is not courteous and is confusing users? That has to be one of the weirdest excuses for abusing a dominant market position since Microsoft banned VARs from installing 3rd party software. In my view banning that software would be an illegal action that should land them in court.

blhack2• 16 years ago

Not to mention the courtesy of not promoting competitors products in one vendor's own turf.

It's weird, I thought that once I purchased a phone, the phone became my turf.

danudey• 16 years ago

You didn't buy the app store, just the phone.

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

If I knew Apple's heavy-handed and capricious app store reviewers would have my business by the throat, I would treat even the most ridiculous and worthless "suggestions" as demands.

maxmason• 16 years ago

Apple is being stupid, it makes them look bad and does Google's job for them.

Dbug• 16 years ago

The article makes use of straw-man argument by bring up VOIP apps. But the avoiding of mentioning a competing app seems reasonable. If there was a Zune store I don't think any would think it appropriate for apps to mention the iPod.

The developer can always encourage people to visit their website, and provide more company/product history there.

thaumaturgy• 16 years ago

Flagged due to headline and sensationalist content.

blhack2• 16 years ago

This really contributes a lot to the discussion, thanks.

lsc• 16 years ago

"I guess I'm just old-fashioned: I like to receive my content unfiltered and make my own decisions."

then, why are you using an apple product? Part of the iphone value proposition is that they do that filtering.

Apple Bans the Word 'Android' From App Store

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