Why is Inkwell stuck in review

vessenes

Sort of buried the lede here -- Apple uses the Inkwell name and has a trademark. This is just not going to get approved. Or, to quote Jobs talking to the iPodRip developer "Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal."

jxdxbx

The top comment there is not correct. You do not have to "defend" trademarks or they "expire." 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.

modeless

Steve Jobs on cell phone companies: "We're not very good at going through orifices to get to the end users." [1] Today, Apple is the orifice. [1] https://youtu.be/IzH54FpWAP0&t=530

etchalon

The terrible consequences of App Review is how dependent you are on whether the App Reviewer you get is either very good at their job or very bad at their job. Mediocre ones seem to cause the most problems.

ChrisMarshallNY

> Inkwell is listed on Apple’s own trademark page. 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.

theli0nheart

I just looked this up. Instagram currently owns the most relevant live trademark for "INKWELL" [1] (class 009). Apple's registration [2] is indeed dead / cancelled. 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

jrmg

the reviewer rejected it because Sign in with Apple was enabled but still prompted for a user’s name 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?

crazygringo

I mean, a lot of these sound entirely reasonable. No way to report or block Micro.blog comments, the Sign In With Apple button didn't work, no way to delete an account you create. The way the author is trying to minimize these seems disingenuous. These seem like things I'm happy Apple is enforcing. 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

danpalmer

> Apple also wanted more explicit terms of service and privacy policy links, so I cluttered up our welcome screen with more buttons. 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.

bluegatty

What's crazy is how 1/2 these are so legit and we want Apple doing this (plausibly) and the other 1/2 is ugly bureaucracy and power leverage. Privacy? Delete Accounts? More of this please. Breaking Apple Sign in - their prerogative. Most of the rest, not so sure.