Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 01.27.2012 @ 9:00 am
Plagiarism has always been an issue in the world of mobile apps and games. Whenever a new app or game finds success, the pale imitators come out of the woodwork, taking the basic style and content and tweaking it just enough to get away with it. Check out the sheer number of Angry Birds rip-offs available for Android and iOS. Check out the numerous shoddy Evernote copycats. Most of the time, the original developer just ignores the freeloaders hanging on their coattails…but when you’re NimbleBit and your iOS Game of the Year Tiny Towers has just been blatantly ripped off by major mobile game developer Zynga, you do anything but stay quiet. The game’s creators took to Twitter to make their displeasure known, revealing that Zynga tried to buy their company before going ahead and stealing their work. Accusations like this get thrown around all of the time, but when you look at the side-by-side comparisons, their grievances suddenly hold a lot of weight. If the mobile app industry is going to move forward, we need to lock down this kind of behavior and call it out as often and as loudly as possible.
Nothing warms my heart more than seeing a practical, useful-in-the-real-world app find tremendous success. The Embark app, which helps users plot routes through New York City’s incredibly useful but often incredibly confusing subway system, is currently creating two million routes every month. Those numbers mean that the developers are officially turning a profit and are planning to expand the app to other cities. Next in the queue? Boston’s subway system. Why can’t I live in a city with decent public transit so I can use Embark? Life is so unfair.
How much of a boost can an app get from being a “featured app” on the Apple or Android store? Um, well, a lot. In most cases, at least. Within the first three days of being featured, an iPad app generally jumps up 27 spots in the rankings, an iPhone app jumps 15 and an Android app leaps an incredible 42 spots. During the course of the week (the standard time to be featured), downloads for these apps rose by several hundred percent. There’s no real trick to becoming featured (developers aren’t informed in advance), but the math is there: being featured can make your app!
So…has Google officially turned evil? Give that link a quick read. If you’re like me, you’re initial reaction is “You betcha!” screamed at the top of your lungs. However, let me direct your attention to this TechCrunch post. Are we actually projecting a worst case scenario onto these developments? After all, we’ve come to expect terrible behavior from major companies, so human beings in general immediately assume the worst whenever a multi-billion dollar name does anything. I await your thoughts in the comments below.
Although the Android market share continues to increase through the sheer volume of available devices, Apple continues to lead the pack through sheer popularity.
In the insane soap opera that surrounds the shutdown of Megaupload and the arrest of its creators, a judge in New Zealand has has denied Kim Dotcom bail, citing him as a serious flight risk. Although I have mixed feelings about this entire ordeal (I like the internet being the Wild West but don’t like Megaupload’s blind eye/support for piracy), this case deserves our full attention. The future of our online world may come out of what happens here.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has always been pretty old fashioned when it comes to their Oscar nominations (The Artist? Seriously?!), but you occasionally see something very cool slip through along the fringes, in the categories that often receive the least media attention. “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore” isn’t just an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Short, it’s also a children’s book…and an app! The film was created by Moonbot, a relatively new production company that has a foot in every form of media. This short was simultaneously developed as a film, a book and an app, letting viewers/readers experience it as they care to. Check out the trailer for the app below and note that this is the day that an app was nominated for an Academy Award!