Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps. This week I want
to talk about how sometimes you're app is just gonna get copied.
Okay, so last week, if you followed the channel you'll see that I posted a video about a guy who had taken my most popular app and pretty much just
copied it. He used the same screenshots, the same description, same name and just
released it. And I released another video kind of just showing it. Showing
you how blatant it was, and I wanted to follow up on this this week
because there's been a quite a few comments about it. I wanna kind of
clarify what bothered me about it, and what didn't bother me about it.
So first of all, let me tell you how it was resolved. I started off usually what I'll
do is contact the developer directly and say "Hey this is my image. This is my
icon." 'cause people have used my icons before. I say I'm going to report you
to Google if you don't remove it, and then they do and they apologized
usually. You know a lot of times that they may not even realize they were
doing anything wrong,
right? But this time what I did is I went to Google first. So I went to them
said "Hey look, this guy has taken 2 of my apps. His only 2 apps are direct copies of
2 of my apps and you know and it's not right." So they came back and actually
said that they're not going to do anything about it this time. So you know
I was kind of like you never know what Google. Sometimes they'll just they'll be
on your side. Sometimes they won't. So at this point, at that point and then I
contacted the developer, and he apologized and he removed the
descriptions, and he removed the image. So my problem with that situation was
not that he had an app that was similar to mine, because there's lots of
apps that are similar to mine. And when I started it, the idea was pretty
unique, right?. So I did a search and I couldn't find anything that was like
Ear Spy when I released it, and this was back in 2012, right?. So but since then there's
been lots of competitors, and lots of things. If you do a search locally, Ear
Spy is still at the top, but you know it's not always going to be that way, most
likely. So I always have to keep improving things and making sure
things go, because that unique idea that you have is only
good for a short amount of time, and you can do the whole...people ask me
if I was gonna patent it, or do anything legal, and I was like...No I'm more,
you know, people will take their idea and wait for years and years and years for a
patent process and never released it and actually be very hush-hush about it, and
then and then gets taken by everybody else in the meantime. I'm a
firm believer as metaphysical as it might sound that when you have an idea
other people are gonna have that idea at the same time. You probably know this
yourself. You have an idea for an Apple or product, or something like that, and then you check to see if it
exists, and it does. You need not copy that idea. That idea was, you know, other
people had a similar one. So you know, those apps that are similar to mine, they may have
been influenced by my app, or you know, if I let my ego get in there, or they might just
be the same thing. The guy had a same idea and all this kind of stuff,
and produced it.
So this is one of the reasons why if you have an app idea,
don't just sit on it. You have to... you have to start moving because other
people are gonna to have that idea too! and they're gonna release it, and
it's more of the case of not who has the best ideas, but who's actually gonna do something
with it, and having said that I've already done videos on the value of an
app idea, which I think are pretty much worthless, unless you actually do them.
But you know, I've been in meetings with clients where they've actually had an
app idea, like in a pub and people, and we were talking about it and when people
would walk by, the client will just hush up and just watch the person walk by, right? So
'cause he thinks that, that random person might steal his big app idea, but so anyway, I just wanted
to clarify that, you know, when you have an app, even if you release an
app, and it's not a hundred percent unique, then you know that that's fine
too. If you're improving on something that's already out there, right?. In terms
of Ear Spy, people say it's the best one out there. It may not be,
there may be some that are actually better, but the owners of those apps
don't know how to do keywords, and all that kind of stuff, you know, thank goodness!, but you
know, and at some point somebody's gonna take me off the top spot, but
that one, but my problem with this guy was he has actually copied everything.
A few years ago, I released... I get my one re-skin . I did one re-skin, taking
existing code. You can see this like cheaper mobile and all that stuff. You may have seen
stuff like this where you can purchase code templates and then re-skin them, and
then release them, and we did one. It was just one. I had a designer at the time who
I didn't really have much for him to do so we thought we'd go this way. We took a
swing copters like a skin, and we released it with a spy theme, trying to
get into that Ear Spy market, and we called it a Spycopter Infiltrator, right?.
So we released that to iTunes and Google Play, and Google actually rejected that.
They said it was, you know, despite the fact that we changed everything and
nothing was the same, except for the gameplay, they still said that we were
trying to mimic another popular app, so they actually, that's one of my 3
banned apps, so
basically I never did a reskin after that, and I don't understand why that
situation didn't apply to somebody else. You know this person was obviously trying to
get, trick people into downloading their app instead of mine and all that
kind of stuff, so which is basically the reason that I had. So and so that's it.
That's it for this week. I just wanted to clarify a little bit. Some
people are saying "Yeah there's other people of the same ideas as mine. Some
people of the same name as mine." and as far as I'm concerned, even if an app
has the same name as mine, I don't mind as long as it's not trying to be exactly
the same as mine. If he uses my name, a name that I put out there, and it's really a
good name, but there is something for, something completely different like
maybe a game or something else, then that's cool, you know, there's
nobody's gonna do a search and confuse mine that one and that one, but if it's
exactly the same in using the same kind of thing, like if you're gonna start a
book, like if you're gonna start a coffee shop, and you called it
Amazon Coffee Shop, that would probably be fine, but you're gonna start a book
website and you call it Amazon then there'll be major issues with that. So that's it, I mean
people are gonna copy. When you put an app out there, so I accept that and
there's a lot of things out there that you know and I'm not so full of ego that
when I see an app that's similar to mine, I think "Oh they must have copied me!", because
most of or more often than not that's not the case. So that's it! I just want to clarify
about that this week. I hope you have a good week this week, and I'll talk to you next week.
Hey! I really hope you like that video. Now, I do this once a week, so if you
wanna hear more, or you wanna hear more about our experiences with the App Store.
either Google Play or iTunes, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel, and please
like this video and leave a comment. I love reading the comments. I love hearing
what you have to say, even if it's just Hello or whatever, and like I said
before, if you're not sure what to say in a comment, like I never know what
to say in a comment, I'll make it easier for you, like if you like it just go
ahead and say "Gnarly" which is an 80's term, or if you didn't like it
just say "Bogus", and if you don't think any of its just say "Eh". So that would be a
big big big help.
And another thing you could do, which I'd really appreciate it. If you're on the
App Store and you want to try one of our apps. Look up some of the Overpass apps.
Applications either on iTunes or Google Play, and leave a review and let us know what
you think about it either good or bad, but you know, we're all trying to build
up in the market so... so that would be a big help. So that's it. I'll talk to you
next week.