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#apple#app#trademark#inkwell#name#https#don#why#store#word
Discussion (49 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
When Sign in with Apple was new, I thought this - not needing to give any personal information to services using it - was one of its selling points. But so many services require you to create an account with them after signing in with Apple that for a long time I’ve thought I was misremembering. Are they all actually just breaking Apple’s terms?
[1] https://youtu.be/IzH54FpWAP0&t=530
This sort of starts from the perspective that a privacy policy is not important, and I get why people might think that, but I think it's a harmful perspective.
Having an explicit policy about how you handle user data is far more useful than ignoring the problem and pretending that you are good for privacy because you don't collect data for ads. Almost every app collects data in some way and it's important to lay those out and be explicit about them.
This is an attitude I see from a lot of small developers, and I think it's something devs need to get better at.
I had an app rejected, because it had the word "Finder" in its title ("Virtual Meeting Finder"). I had to change the name of the app, and it wasn't too big a deal, because the original name was fairly unimaginative (as it was supposed to be).
But it does sound like the whole app name is in conflict with a registered Apple trademark. It's unlikely to ever be approved.
You lose a trademark if it becomes generic, regardless of how hard you tried to keep it from being so. Obviously if you let a bunch of actual infringements slide you're on the way to becoming generic, but all that matters is whether the trademark IS generic.
But, when lawyers write letters to people saying "you can't say escalator or Zamboni" you can just ignore them. Using a trademark in writing in a way that a trademark owner does not like is not infringement.
https://www.dreyfus.fr/en/2025/03/18/proof-of-use-in-the-uni...
And this is my biggest gripe with products from well-known companies that use already generic terms like "Apple", "Word", "X", or "Inkwell". I understand claiming exclusivity of words like "Microsoft Word", but not for the word "Word" itself.
I remember when the Apple logo stickers Apple packed in had a little (R), which was later dropped, since it's ugly and not legally required. But no doubt some lawyer advised putting it there to begin with.
You could possibly try to register the "INKWELL" trademark for an RSS reader, since that seems quite differentiated from Instagram's claim, but IANAL, so who knows how successful that process would be.
[1]: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/86733442
[2]: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/78126699
The trademark one sounds like the main problem. Obviously, for example, Apple won't let you register an app called "GarageBand". In this case, "Inkwell" seems like a dead Apple trademark but that is still listed. But I do see that there are two iPhone apps simply called "Inkwell" and at least six more that start with "Inkwell", e.g. "Inkwell: Private Micro Journal". [1]
The reviewer is probably just trying to follow policy, when other reviewers have made exceptions. Hopefully there's a way to point to the many exceptions and get it approved after all? Is there a way to escalate/appeal to get a different reviewer?
[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/search?term=inkwell
In here it sounds like this is a client to a third party service. Mail.app and Thunderbird don't have buttons to delete my Gmail account
I do agree all of this seems basically like "sure, fine". Just seems rough to get pinged with all of these in a slow stream, and having wall clock time go waaaaaay up for it.
It's not, Micro.blog is a service made and run by the author.
The key word seems to be "almost". So it sounds like the app let you create accounts but not delete accounts. That's why I'm saying that it seems disingenuous of the author to be complaining. If you don't allow for account creation, then you don't need to allow for deletion. But if you have a creation flow in-app, you need a deletion flow in-app. You don't get to hide around assumptions around "almost".
In any case, Apps are mostly irrelevant these days. Ten years ago people cared about being in the top 10 apps in the app store. That ship sailed a long time ago. Not a chance. Forget it. not going to happen. App stores as a discovery mechanism for your application are dead as a door nail as far as I can see. Apple and Google ran this into the ground. If you don't find another way to tell people about your app, they'll never find it. So, why bother with them at all? Just engineer around them.
Make a nice webapp instead. Maybe package it up as a PWA. You can do a lot of stuff in browsers these days. Signups and payments happen on the web so you need a web first experience anyway. That's why many apps look like their web version these days; they are mostly just that with some minor window dressing for things like notifications and maybe a menu or two are actually native. Just skip that. Notifications are mainly annoying and nobody cares about your menus having slightly nicer "native" toggles or whatever.
I think holding that kind of power over devices people own is problematic, but I seem to be in the minority here.
Much more extreme example, I read a court case where the cops were really annoyed the perp told them they should've been enforcing $muchWorseCrime elsewhere. Judge wasn't a fan either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_6_POD
Or iPad https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18669394
Etc.
With Apple, being a corporation and not a moral actor, it comes down to “might makes right” when it comes to trademark and other IP laws.
Privacy? Delete Accounts? More of this please.
Breaking Apple Sign in - their prerogative.
Most of the rest, not so sure.
Mediocre ones seem to cause the most problems.
Maybe they always scroll that trademarks page, they're just really thorough.