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?
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.
"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.
> 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.
It seems the entire linked story was misleading. The dev mentioned the app was a finalist in a Google Android competition. Apple didn't reject it but suggested (whatever that means) the description be changed to remove mention of being in the competition and I agree http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1106361. The iPhone app port wasn't the competitor in that competition.
But presumably it was a 1:1 port, not a 'lite' version. In which case, the only major difference there might be would be would in the performance department, though I'm unsure if the competition weighed that heavily.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
Agreed completely. But I was just trying to wonder why they had the policy in the first place. In large bureaucracies, policies inevitably have weird edge cases.
