Let’s hope this isn’t the start of an ugly trend. This story could help to shape the iPhone and your app choices for it in the future.
Shaker, a “Tetris-like” game with a martini glass theme, has suddenly been pulled from the App Store. TUAW provided a first look at the game back in early September. According to reports, developer Phunkware was told that Shaker would be removed from the App Store after the Tetris Company and Tetris Holdings LLC complained to Apple that the app resembled Tetris too closely. And people thought iPhone development was considered a “toy” project. Even the big companies are taking notice of the apps on here.
The only thing that makes this strange is that Tetris would wait a month to complain about Shaker’s similarities to their game. It’s almost a certainty that Tetris knew about this game well before then. This even despite some obvious facts: Shaker had graphics that were nothing at all like those in Tetris, and a “shaker” game mode in which the accelerometer was used to move and flip the falling blocks that Tetris doesn’t have. The game even supplied martini recipes to top scorers (odd, but appropriate to the theme), and was quite a bit smaller in download size (3.5 MB compared to 9.6 MB for Tetris).
Can we now expect iPhone games like Jewel Quest II and Trism to be pulled from the App Store because of their similarity to Bejeweled? Can any large company release an app, then eliminate their competition just by saying the app is too similar to theirs? A slippery slope, indeed, and one that App Store fans should be quite upset about if they value fair competition in the their marketplace.
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