So, after spending a couple of days thinking about this “squatter” issue on the Mac App Store that we seem to be hearing about still, I had a thought. Maybe someone should contact the guy who has been given the app name for the Mac App Store and figure out exactly what happened. Did someone actually squat the name Fluid, or was something else at work here? Instead of jumping to conclusions, and assuming that he, or anyone else for that matter, has been trying to eat up names of popular desktop applications before anyone else can, we should let him talk about it.
It probably should have happened first, before running with the post. Considering we were the first blog to publish the findings (by a country mile), I thought it would only be right to let Fabien Sanglard, the creator of Fluid and Fluid 2 on iOS devices and let him have his say.
So here it is!
Fabien released Fluid and Fluid 2 in the App Store in June of 2009. According to his website, he has seen over 3,000,000 downloads. That’s pretty huge. His application is a “free interactive water simulation for the iPhone.” So Fabien has two iOS based applications in the App Store, both of which have reserved the name Fluid. This is where the Mac App Store comes into play. According to Fabien, “The Mac AppStore and iOS AppStore seem to be the same entity so any name already used in the iPhone/iTouch/iPad AppStore will not be available on the “Mac AppStore.”
Fabien goes on to say that he did not reserve the application name on the Mac App Store, and it seems like it was already awarded to him because of his reservation in the iOS App Store. This is not good news for Apple or OS X developers.
If an OS X developer has not reserved an application name in the iOS store, but someone else already has an application in store with the same name, the OS X developer is out of luck. The name has already been reserved by Apple or awarded to the iOS developer.
There is a dispute system setup at Apple that lets developers, who posses legitimate trademarks for application names, reclaim their naming rights. So this story is far from over, but it’s pretty obvious that there’s already a huge mess in the Mac App Store.
