Israeli iPhone app developer house ApParty had a huge surprise earlier this month when they received their sales results, indeed they had increased by almost a 100%, and this mostly on the American market. While trying to find out what could have possibly impacted them so strongly they discovered a very interesting story.
What happened is that a T-Mobile Android ad started airing in the US and featured a rip-off of ApParty’s app iFog. People seeing it on TV, even though it was featured on an device running Android, started looking for it on the App Store and buying it. It even bumped the app all the way to the top 20 section of the US App Store.
I’m trying at the moment to find out if the other look-alike app featured in the ad (which looks a lot like MoutOff) was also affected by this spillover effect. Here is the actual ad:
[via TechCrunch]
I was massively surprised when developers and mates contacted to say MouthOff™ had apeared on a TMobile US addvert, they I saw some developer had ripped off the app, (when we investigated we found out that we had actually submitted the first build of MouthOff™ to this guy, as he had a iPhone review site.. obviousely using it purely to rip off apps in android!!!) Sadly the Android version is a pretty bad copy, with low quality design and animation. Needless to say he has done us a favour as MouthOff™ Android launches any day now!!!