Android Rip-Offs Help Boost iPhone App Sales : Episode 2
Yesterday we talked about how the Android T-Mobile commercial featuring an iFog look-alike bumped the sales of the App Store version, well it turns out that iFog wasn't the only app who received a bump in sales.
After viewing the commercial I noticed that there was another pretty clear look-alike featured and I quickly contacted the developer of the iPhone app MouthOff to see if they had noticed an increase in their sales as well.
The developers of MouthOff say the app featured in the Android commercial (Face-It) was a rip-off of the sneakiest kind. Bel3ax Software, the developers of the Android MouthOff look-alike used to run an iPhone application review website and received one of the first builds of MouthOff from ustwo to be used for an application review. Here is the official statement of ustwo:
A few months after releasing MouthOff™ back in March 2009, we noticed an almost identical app selling on the Android Market called FaceIT. We couldn’t help notice how similar it was to MouthOff™ - with some of the designs included in the app almost identical to our most popular mouths. Recently we tested the Android version and weren’t too impressed with the low quality design and animation. We also realised that we had been communicating with Bel3ax through their app review site (www.ipfun.org) whilst promoting MouthOff™ months before.
As you can see there are no hard feelings... So what about the spill-over ? I obtained the sales results of MouthOff today, (big thanks to mills from ustwo for his great collaboration). Here are the two sales report:
Interesting right ? It seems like the ad had less impact on MouthOff than on iFog (we're talking about 50% increase) but according to the developers it clearly affected them.
The irony is that by ripping off App Store developers, Android developers actually helped them increase their sales!
Nonetheless, I would advise the teams in charge of the Android Market to give a little more concern to piracy, more stories like this one could give them a bad rep.
