“Apple has been accused of ‘ripping off’ a student developer’s iPhone app which was submitted to and rejected by the firm’s App Store,” Tom Chivers and Christopher Williams report for The Telegraph. “The company allegedly released an app with the same functions, a near-identical logo and the same name, a year after telling the developer that his app was rejected for “security concerns” and for doing things outside the official software development kit’s limits.”
“Greg Hughes, a third year computer science student at the University of Birmingham, developed an application called ‘Wi-Fi Sync’ and offered it to Apple’s App Store in May 2010. The app was designed to sync iTunes libraries with iPhones over a wireless wireless network rather than via a USB connector,” Chivers and Williams report. “After the App Store rejected his submission Mr Hughes put his app up for sale on the Cydia store, a rival to the App Store which sells software for ‘jailbroken’ iPhones… The app, priced at $9.99 (£6.07), has become one of Cydia’s top products, selling more than 50,000 copies since its release.”
Chivers and Williams report, “But this Monday, Apple unveiled its new iPhone operating system, iOS 5, with an inbuilt feature also called Wi-Fi Sync, which carries out the same wireless syncing function. It also has a very similar logo.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hughes’ icon looks like it was based on the icon for Apple’s iSync, which exited beta on January 2, 2003. Beyond that, syncing via Wi-Fi is hardly an original idea, so only a code comparison would show if there’s any “ripping off” going on.
[Attribution: AppleInsider. Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Lava_Head_UK” for the heads up.]