[Update 11/5: Macgasm has published more information on the subject — it turns out that Mac App Store names tie right into iOS App Store names, which sounds like it could tricky very quickly.]
Here’s something that certain Mac developers are having to think think about: registering the names of their existing Mac applications with Apple’s Mac App Store before somebody else does. Very specific names like “Super Monkey Ball” should be just fine, but applications with more common names, such as “Fluid” (a free and excellent site-specific browser), are already running into issues with “land grabbing”.
I think that Joshua Schnell at Macgasm — who alerted me to this entire issue in the first place — makes a good point that the Mac App Store is a different situation from the iOS App Store, specifically when it comes to existing brands or products.
iOS has seen its share of ports or mobile versions of established brands, but all of these apps started out at version 1.0 on the iOS App Store. They also all came to the iOS platform at around the same time. There was definitely still a name-grabbing race on the iPhone, but this race took place on a platform that had, previously, been entirely bereft of apps.
The Mac App Store is (or at least sounds) different because it’s a storefront for a full-fledged computing platform that has a number of established products. For existing products the Mac App Store seems to be less about establishing an identity and more about stepping into the sweet, sweet Apple spotlight. So when somebody who isn’t Todd Ditchendorf (developer of the Fluid Mac app) goes and grabs the “Fluid” name on the App Store, I can understand how that might tick some people off. After all, when you google “Fluid”, Todd’s site-specific browser is the first link to pop up.
That being said, I’m also not entirely convinced that this is a huge problem (though that may simply be because I haven’t thought about it for long enough).
The Mac App Store is a competitive arena and it sucks when an established product like Fluid has its name registered, but it also seems to me that simply part of the whole game, and that savvy Mac devs have to really keep on top of registering and knowing the rules if they want to live at the top of the food chain. It also shows how important a unique name is to identifying your product. It might be easy to register “Fluid”, but completely unique names should be a lot harder to copy.
However, if that sounds too harsh (especially from a non-developer), how about this for a parting thought?
I’ve always thought of Fluid as “Fluid SSB”, anyway, and I’ve gotten used to the ridiculous crowded nature of the iOS App Store, where different apps can share very similar names. So if I were to log onto the Mac App Store to search for “Fluid” and encountered more than one search result, I doubt I’d be all that confused. I’d see “Fluid” as just some app, and identify “Fluid SSB” (the one I know) by its name, description, and icon in much the same way as I do with apps on my iPhone. So even if a given developer isn’t able to register his or her app name in time, they might still be able to take comfort in the fact that buyers are getting a little savvier thanks to shopping in the crowded iOS market.
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