App Store Clones Copy Your App Down to the Reviews

“Second this unfortunately... [re: one person farmed our AI free trial with 9 apple IDs and ran up ~$1,900 in image costs. how do you stop this without punishing real users?]”

What’s going on here? submitted by /u/sigummer [link] [comments]

“You retain copyright unless ownership was legally transferred. The company cant simply assume it can resell the app to other customers. How you responded in subsequent messages could hurt your position or be irrelevant, depending on what you said. Either way, now that he has raised this, you need to clearly state your position: he was only granted a license to use the app for his business and you never granted permission to resell or distribute it elsewhere. Express to him, it’s unimaginable tha”

“Worth nailing down who built what early. Keep your commit history and original files, that timeline is your strongest evidence if someone forks your work and claims it. Anchoring key files on the blockchain at milestones also gives you a verifiable timestamp tied to the exact file, so you can prove authorship independent of any platform. I'm building a small tool called Incipite for this, happy to share it if you're curious.”

“if you only do one of those this week, do the changelog. it's the cheapest page to keep alive and dated entries get recrawled on their own, so it holds a brand serp slot without you touching it again. the play store one is separate and slower, that index doesn't read your website at all”

Questly is honestly quite an easy name to land upon though

“Looking for some advice on a frustrating situation we’re dealing with as two indie devs. We launched our app about a month ago. We’ve been building the brand publicly since late 2025, have press coverage from Retro Dodo, over 1000 users and growing organically with zero ad spend. The problem is that someone released an app in the same niche using our name. No independent social media presence, suspicious feature set & an AI generated logo. Current Google situation (searching via iPhone) 1) o”

“I check my App Store numbers most mornings. Usually it's 2 or 3 downloads and nothing worth looking at. Last week one of my apps did 23 in a week, which is a lot for me. Then I looked closer and 20 of them happened on the same day. Same day, one app, no marketing, no posts, nothing I did. Took me a while to work out what it was. Apple breaks downloads out by source, and that day was almost entirely "Institutional Purchase." That means a company bought it through Apple Business Mana”

“Before you find a lawyer… make sure you keep word of EVERYTHING, if they truely yoinked your code and didn’t pay you, you will be glad you did..”

“Thanks for checking it out! Good to know it's just a directory site. I feel much better now.”

It gives you backlinks to your app. It helps you a lot.

“Thanks for the reply! The first comment thought I was just shilling, so I was a bit worried. I'm relieved to hear that this is normal. It's only been 3 months since launch, and everything is still new to me. I have no idea how it got submitted either. I just happened to find it on Google and was really surprised. By the way, what kind of tools or apps do you make?”

“Well, that depends if they make enough money of stealing from you to pay attorney to fight you until you run out of money vs paying royalties. Maybe check back in a couple of years.”

“They would likely move it or remove him somehow the op I mean esp if they have a copy directly.. playing devil's advocate here if i were on the other side id have already spent time working on it still improving here snd there making it dfftent as it would help their case in tne end.... im saying this as it's a possibility to consider them doing to you so that is why I think sooner the better whatever you do.... Also can they afford a better attorney than you and willing to go that route”

“Interesting case, sorry to hear you’re going through this. I’d imagine this is happening a lot now with all the “we’d rather build our own” objections. Go in any AI, build me an X or Reddit clone, it’ll be done in 5min. It’s the reality we live in now. Up to you if you want to continue with the project yourself separately, or just move on completely as others have mentioned. Your assistance with their build will be returned to you in many other ways ✨”

“I see a lot of people on this sub complaining about distribution , to be very honest this is one of the main problems an indie hacker will Face, there are thousands of apps on the AppStore in the same niche produced everyday and anybody can spin up one at anytime , Your app worth 0 if you can’t distribute and that’s a very big problem most founders are facing a lot , you need to learn how to distribute For me what has worked is , I purchase iPhone 7/8 from my local country, warm them up and post”

Which app ios this? that would give easier ways to advice over it

“great job stealing an open source project 1:1 and turning it into a paid app https://x.com/s13k\_/status/2064705517264552274?s=46”

I actually took a screenshot of it and made it my Mac wallpaper.

“Apple removing apps from their own app store which compete with their new product?”

“How does that make any sense for why their app should be taken down and account banned? Because someone was able to buy/subscribe to the app, but it all of a sudden a grandma who doesn’t know how to use Apple Pay, so they should take OP’s app down?”

“+350k views and 3 users, so I’m a bad marketer then… Also, I have also a link in the comments with screenshots since many will say “it’s fake”. With so much hate I was thinking to delete this post since my hope was to warn a few fellow indie devs. To be cautious of those situations.”

“quick reality check on the backups, having every file doesn't mean you have a portable app. these platforms wire the app to their own backend, auth and build pipeline, so the files are shaped around their infra and won't just boot somewhere else. your revenuecat setup and bundle ids carry over fine, but the database, api routes and server side all have to be re-pointed to wherever you move, and that's real work not a copy paste. godaddy shared hosting won't run this kind of app,”

“This is exactly what happens when you vibecode your app. What did you use as your backend? Supabase without rbac? He just extracted your databases and reverse engineered his way around.”

“https://preview.redd.it/0vv2vwlq12bh1.png?width=844&format=png&auto=webp&s=20e16fcda03b4ebf0a469cddcd07630b0854c0e3 Are you sure it's not a GitHub copy? I mean, based on your logic, you saw a cover pic., and you assumed it's the same thing... You're comparing 2 differit type of apps.”

“Yours is a copy of someone else’s https://preview.redd.it/t0beb7axz1bh1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79d23c846ce71c71b5d3c9af22c5db0de8fe513d from a year ago…😂 here is theres with 2k ratings”

“Learned this the hard way at a company I co-founded. Competitors cloned our features constantly. What they couldn't copy was the years of customer relationships and the data we'd built up. The code was always the easy part.”

“I might be wrong but this sounds a bit like "I told AI to clone this app and uploaded it to the App Store. Now someone used AI to clone my App and uploaded it to the App Store"”

“My approach was to register the trademark and send a cease and desist letter if someone copy the same name on the app”

“I would advice you change the name and remove demo data. He needs to take the whole thing down. That data is yours.”

“How long has your app been live? If you have got trademark on Loggd that will make Apple move faster too.”

“I edited the post. Nothing confidential data leaked, it seems I was not clear in my post.”

“Morning! He’s not on App Store anymore. (He replied to the email from Apple and he said that is gonna do the fixes + a rename).”

“Fake, why? I have print screens + records of the copycat. (Checked in the morning and he’a not on App Store anymore)”

“I have prints screens/records of his app. (It had almost the same name as mine) I just searched on App Store he’s already out (he replied on the Apple Report that I did, that’s gonna rename the app, so I guess he did that already)”