Apple Claims Ownership Of Shiny Chat Bubbles; Yet Another Controversial App Store Rejection

An update to Blunder Move's Chess Wars, a game that allows users to play chess with friends via Facebook Connect, has been rejected due to chat bubbles that too closely resemble Apple's own SMS app chat bubbles, at least according to the blog (NSFW) of one of the developers of the app, Joe Stump.  Furthermore, Apple actually claims to have these special, shiny chat bubbles trademarked. Chess Wars was originally released in early July and was updated to v1.1 on July 30th to fix a bug that was missed in the initial release.  Apparently v1.1 also had some "show stopping" bugs that needed to be fixed rather quickly, so the developers once again submitted an update to the app hoping for a quick turnaround.  This most recent update has been sitting in Apple's approval queue for about six weeks without a single peep as to why it is being held hostage, that is, until now. Today an Apple representative contacted Stump, which TechCrunch's anti-Apple post probably had something to do with, regarding the huge delay.

They said they were rejecting the application because our in-game chat looked too much like Apple's SMS application. I've asked if we changed our chat bubbles to look like Facebooks if we'd be allowed in. Our contact at Apple is going to be getting back to me soon.

Soon came rather quickly, as Stump's Apple contact explained in more detail what he could do to get his app approved.

Just got off the phone with Apple while I was writing this blog post and they told me, no joke, that the chat bubbles are, in fact, trademarked. Furthermore, they suggested I could, among other suggestions make them “less shiny.”

The story contains quite a few variables, but the biggest issue is that there are countless other apps that use shiny chat bubbles (image above shows a side-by-side of Chess Wars and Facebook's chat bubbles), so unless Apple intends to stop all other developers from using them, they should probably explain this inconsistency.  However, explaining inconsistencies has never been Apple's strength.

Stump is also currently waiting for an explanation from Apple as to why it took so long to be informed of this issue.  If shiny chat bubbles were the only problem all along, the update could have been fixed in a timely manner.

Let this be a lesson to all of you iPhone and iPod touch app developers out there: Don't use shiny chat bubbles!

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