Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:04 ◼   ► news of note and iOS development, Apple and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm

00:00:08 ◼   ► an independent iOS developer based in Herman, Virginia. This is show number 170. Today is

00:00:13 ◼   ► Wednesday, January 15. Developing Perspective was never longer than 15 minutes. So let's

00:00:18 ◼   ► get started. First, just a quick note, if you may have noticed that this I said this

00:00:22 ◼   ► was episode 170 and not episode 156, as you may have been expecting. This is basically

00:00:29 ◼   ► I'm just re-numbering the shows. Every time I do an interview or I do talk about retrospectively

00:00:36 ◼   ► or whatever about the show, I always have to have these weird caveats because early

00:00:39 ◼   ► on in the show's history, when I did some interviews and some other things that were

00:00:44 ◼   ► part of the show, I didn't number them in the sequential order. And this is just one

00:00:49 ◼   ► these things that has been starting slowly driving me crazy. And it's just kind of one

00:00:53 ◼   ► of my OCD things that I just wanted to sort out. And since I control the numbers, and

00:00:56 ◼   ► it's my show, I'm just going to fix it. And so this is episode 170, which is the 170th

00:01:03 ◼   ► episode of this show, which seems like the way it should be. So anyway, just that's a

00:01:07 ◼   ► minor note, don't worry about it. Things will just continue as normal from now, but I will

00:01:10 ◼   ► feel much better. Alright, and another quick note, I will be speaking at NS North next

00:01:16 ◼   ► It's a great little conference in Ottawa, and I just wanted to mention it here.

00:01:20 ◼   ► If you're in Canada or like Canada, it'll be a great little place to go.

00:01:24 ◼   ► The guys who run it have done a great job.

00:01:26 ◼   ► I think this is the second year of the show's existence, and so this is another kind of

00:01:30 ◼   ► example of me trying to try some new things this year and stretch myself a little bit.

00:01:35 ◼   ► And so I haven't typically done much conference speaking, and so far this year I'll be doing

00:01:39 ◼   ► three conference talks, which is a little intimidating, a little bit scary, but it's

00:01:44 ◼   ► thing I'm excited about exploring and just exploring and understanding a bit more about

00:01:49 ◼   ► myself and seeing how well I can do with that, how much I enjoy it, as well as also hopefully

00:01:55 ◼   ► just gaining a new skill, which is always exciting.

00:01:57 ◼   ► All right, so I'm going to now get into the main topic of the day's show, which I could

00:02:01 ◼   ► call a couple of different things. I kind of call it distinctiveness, and that's probably

00:02:05 ◼   ► what I'll title the show. And it's kind of the way that I manage distinctiveness. You

00:02:11 ◼   ► You could call it branding, you could call it copyright.

00:02:12 ◼   ► It has a lot of different things.

00:02:14 ◼   ► But this is coming out of a situation that I have with one of my apps, Podometer++, which

00:02:18 ◼   ► is an app for the iPhone 5S that takes advantage of its motion tracking capabilities to create

00:02:24 ◼   ► essentially a podometer that's built into your phone, that doesn't drain your battery,

00:02:29 ◼   ► etc.

00:02:30 ◼   ► It's a cool app that I really enjoy writing and it's what I've been working on this last

00:02:32 ◼   ► week.

00:02:33 ◼   ► And it's just probably about once a day, sometimes a little less, but around once a day.

00:02:38 ◼   ► I'll get a note from somebody saying, "Hey, have you seen this app?

00:02:41 ◼   ► It looks just like pedometer."

00:02:42 ◼   ► And then I'm sort of using it as often some kind of comment, "Oh, you know, imitation

00:02:45 ◼   ► is in serious form of flattery," or whatever.

00:02:48 ◼   ► Because there's a collection of apps, I'm not entirely sure exactly how many, but there's

00:02:52 ◼   ► at least two or three that are pretty much exact copies of the pedometer++ aesthetic.

00:03:01 ◼   ► And I get a lot of comments about, "Oh, what are you going to do about this?

00:03:05 ◼   ► What's going to happen?"

00:03:06 ◼   ► And I thought it happened, you know, once I get a question five or six times, I think

00:03:09 ◼   ► it's probably worth me just addressing it on the show and unpacking a little bit how

00:03:15 ◼   ► I think about these things and the way that I've sort of just learned to deal with it.

00:03:21 ◼   ► So first, it's probably fair to say, it's like, there's a very big difference between

00:03:28 ◼   ► an idea and a design.

00:03:32 ◼   ► And by that I mean, so the concept

00:03:35 ◼   ► of developing a pedometer using the motion tracking

00:03:38 ◼   ► capabilities of Apple's M7 coprocessor

00:03:41 ◼   ► is not particularly unique.

00:03:42 ◼   ► And that's not something that I would necessarily

00:03:45 ◼   ► hold onto as something that I invented

00:03:47 ◼   ► or that I was unique or somehow especially privileged in.

00:03:52 ◼   ► Apple created this technology, and one

00:03:55 ◼   ► of the most obvious uses for it is to make a pedometer.

00:03:57 ◼   ► And so that's what I did.

00:03:59 ◼   ► So that's not-- it's just good to say that out front, though,

00:04:02 ◼   ► that that's not what I'm talking about.

00:04:04 ◼   ► That it's like having someone copy your concept.

00:04:06 ◼   ► I mean, there are very few unique concepts.

00:04:09 ◼   ► And honestly, you can get very, very tied to knots,

00:04:13 ◼   ► getting too wrapped up around being first,

00:04:15 ◼   ► being that it's important that you're

00:04:17 ◼   ► recognized as being the first person to do something.

00:04:20 ◼   ► It's just-- it's ultimately unproductive, more often

00:04:23 ◼   ► than not, to hold on to that too tightly

00:04:26 ◼   ► and to really sort of wrap into it.

00:04:28 ◼   ► Because ultimately, being first doesn't matter so much

00:04:30 ◼   ► as being best.

00:04:32 ◼   ► And they're very different things.

00:04:33 ◼   ► You can be the first at something

00:04:34 ◼   ► and have a not great implementation

00:04:38 ◼   ► that someone else can come along and improve on in a way that

00:04:41 ◼   ► will make the concept and the actual underlying functionality

00:04:47 ◼   ► better.

00:04:47 ◼   ► And that's a good thing.

00:04:48 ◼   ► And I think by and large, that's something

00:04:50 ◼   ► that I would encourage and like.

00:04:52 ◼   ► There's a difference, however, between that

00:04:55 ◼   ► and a design. And a design is something that I would call, it's something, being distinctive,

00:04:59 ◼   ► being recognizable. Having a, something that, if someone looks at an app, they familiar,

00:05:04 ◼   ► I mean, they associate it immediately with something else. And this is what's a lot of

00:05:09 ◼   ► what's happened with Podometer where there's a lot of these apps that have the same exact

00:05:12 ◼   ► physical layout. You know, it's like it has a settings button in the top left, a share

00:05:16 ◼   ► button in the top right. It has the app's name in the nav bar. Below that, it has the

00:05:21 ◼   ► the number of steps you've taken today. Below that, it has the number of steps that you've

00:05:25 ◼   ► taken this week. It's all color-coded based on a goal that you set. And then below that,

00:05:31 ◼   ► it has a series of horizontal bar charts that one for each day with the date, the number

00:05:37 ◼   ► of steps, and then either the goal that they've--your goal accomplishment or the distance you've

00:05:41 ◼   ► traveled or calories or something like that is associated with it. And that particular

00:05:46 ◼   ► layout, that choice of colors, etc. is the part where it gets tricky, the part where

00:05:51 ◼   ► people are essentially copying that. And if I'm honest, one of these things that doesn't

00:05:57 ◼   ► make me that doesn't make me happy. That makes me a little bit, it definitely hits you a

00:06:00 ◼   ► little bit low, where you're like, that, that's my design, like you took it and you copied

00:06:07 ◼   ► it. And like I said, it's not about doing the same app concept. It's about taking the

00:06:13 ◼   ► exactly how I built it, how I structured it, and putting it, you know, and then just sort

00:06:19 ◼   ► of copying it exactly. It's being a Xerox machine rather than interpreting the way I

00:06:23 ◼   ► do what I've done and really expanding on it and making it your own, which would be

00:06:26 ◼   ► fine. If someone wants to come along and make a better pedometer app, that's great. That's

00:06:30 ◼   ► the competitive market that I work in, but it feels different when someone is copying

00:06:34 ◼   ► exactly your app down to a lot of the details, a lot of the layout and coloring decisions

00:06:38 ◼   ► and structures and things like that. You know, there is a certain amount of needing to differentiate

00:06:43 ◼   ► yourself if you're going to enter into a market. And so that's kind of the challenge and the

00:06:50 ◼   ► struggle that I have because you see these apps and I'm always like, "Oh, man, another

00:06:53 ◼   ► one?" You know, there's something that's just kind of unfortunate about it where obviously

00:06:58 ◼   ► on the one end, I'm worried that people are going to buy that app or download that app

00:07:02 ◼   ► for a couple of these difficulties or paid and then be disappointed or contact me and

00:07:07 ◼   ► be like, "Hey, I got your pedometer app and it doesn't work quite right." Or, "Hey, it

00:07:11 ◼   ► it doesn't work this." And it's like, "You don't have my app." And that's really complicated

00:07:15 ◼   ► and confusing for me. It's like, "What do I do with that person?" It's like, "Here,

00:07:19 ◼   ► go get my app. It's free in the App Store. I'd appreciate you get that one. If you think

00:07:24 ◼   ► you're getting Pedometer++, make sure you're getting Pedometer++."

00:07:28 ◼   ► But ultimately, more of its impacts, I think, are just personal. They're emotional rather

00:07:37 ◼   ► than necessarily business. Because the reality is a lot of these apps aren't, don't have

00:07:42 ◼   ► nearly the traction. The app store is so crowded that it's unlikely they're going to get a

00:07:46 ◼   ► massive amount of attention anyway. I mean, it's possible. But by and large, the nature

00:07:51 ◼   ► of the app store is that it's very hard to copy something else and then to have wide

00:07:56 ◼   ► success. And even if it did, even if it had wide success, there's only so much you can

00:07:59 ◼   ► do. So what I was going to talk about now is some of the things that you could do to

00:08:03 ◼   ► deal with it and kind of where I come down on it. So you know, so you see one of these apps, and

00:08:08 ◼   ► it appears in the store, it's very much a copy of what you've done. And what do you do? So you,

00:08:13 ◼   ► you can ignore it, which is just largely what I do. But you, you know, the tricky thing about like,

00:08:20 ◼   ► drawing attention to it in any way is that it will, you know, you're only making the problem

00:08:24 ◼   ► worse. You know, so if someone sends me a link to these things, it's like, I'm not likely going to

00:08:28 ◼   ► to be retweeting that or posting about it or making a big deal publicly about it because

00:08:33 ◼   ► more likely than not, all that's doing is driving attention to the thing that I don't

00:08:37 ◼   ► want people to be looking at. If people are thinking, "I want a pedometer app for my iPhone

00:08:43 ◼   ► 5S," I want them to think "pedometer++." They type it in the search bar and go get it. And

00:08:48 ◼   ► that's really what I want. I could privately reach out to these people and say, "Hey, you

00:08:52 ◼   ► know what you're doing isn't so cool. I understand you want to make a pedometer app. That's cool.

00:08:56 ◼   ► don't copy my design though. That doesn't feel right. I could have some success with

00:09:03 ◼   ► that probably. It's always tricky because I don't know these people. If it was someone

00:09:09 ◼   ► I knew, it might be a little different. But if it's someone I don't know, like it's honestly

00:09:13 ◼   ► if someone I knew when someone was copying my app, I'd feel it would be a very different

00:09:17 ◼   ► conversation. But in general, I could probably reach out with someone and I just don't know

00:09:22 ◼   ► what they'll do with that. It's a very dangerous situation. Not physically dangerous, but just

00:09:29 ◼   ► I don't know how that interaction is going to go. You become very contentious, could

00:09:33 ◼   ► become heated in ways that aren't necessarily productive. I could contact Apple. They have

00:09:39 ◼   ► a pretty good copyright takedown process in place. I could write a cease and desist letter

00:09:45 ◼   ► kind of thing and put that out there and say, "Hey, you're using the trade dress and style

00:09:51 ◼   ► of my application, please don't. And they may or may not have a response to that. And

00:09:57 ◼   ► I guess on the far extreme, you could potentially take legal action. It's trickier for something

00:10:02 ◼   ► like a design. It would certainly be if they were using your actual name, things that are

00:10:06 ◼   ► much more copyrightable or trademarkable or those types of things where you actually would

00:10:10 ◼   ► have a legal case for it rather than just sort of an app store policy case for it. But

00:10:15 ◼   ► by and large, what I usually do is I just ignore it. And I've gone through this experience

00:10:20 ◼   ► enough times that in by and large, and this applies to a lot of things in the way that

00:10:24 ◼   ► I run my business is I'm going to try and apply my energy and my focus and my, you know,

00:10:32 ◼   ► mental, you know, I only have so many thoughts that I can have in a day and I can have so

00:10:37 ◼   ► much attention that I have in a day. And I'm going to try and apply those to places that

00:10:41 ◼   ► are improving my products that are making them better, that are benefiting the largest

00:10:45 ◼   ► number of people. And that's something that as an independent, I found especially I have

00:10:49 ◼   ► have to do. There are a lot of things that I can do and choices that I can make that

00:10:55 ◼   ► would impact and help one person or a relatively small number of people. But being that I'm

00:11:02 ◼   ► one person, I just can't consistently make those decisions because I've gone through

00:11:06 ◼   ► periods where I've done that. This is, for example, why I don't do my first round. I

00:11:11 ◼   ► hired somebody to do my help desk, at least as a first pass, who goes through and filters

00:11:15 ◼   ► and processes and does all of the normal responses that are fairly generic in some ways and then

00:11:22 ◼   ► filters and passes back to me the more tricky or nuanced cases.

00:11:26 ◼   ► I have someone else do that because anytime I would sit down and I would do help desk,

00:11:31 ◼   ► the volume of it is to a degree that it would take a substantial part of my day.

00:11:35 ◼   ► And I'm helping and dealing with and improving the experience of one customer at a time.

00:11:40 ◼   ► And you could say that's important, each customer values.

00:11:42 ◼   ► But the reality is I'm one developer, and if I'm spending, say, half my day working

00:11:47 ◼   ► on helping one customer at a time, I'm not really helping the broader audience of my

00:11:53 ◼   ► applications.

00:11:54 ◼   ► The hundreds or millions, hundreds of thousands or millions of people who use my applications

00:11:58 ◼   ► are being hurt by that.

00:12:00 ◼   ► And so this is another kind of example where I'm going to take my energy and I'm going

00:12:02 ◼   ► to take my focus and I'm going to just work on making my products better.

00:12:06 ◼   ► And I'm going to rely on the fact that in this case, I can likely improve my applications

00:12:11 ◼   ► and I can make them better and do things in ways that someone who's just copying would

00:12:16 ◼   ► be much more -- would have much greater difficulty in doing.

00:12:21 ◼   ► Because the reality is when I -- you know, when I build an application, I'm coming at

00:12:25 ◼   ► it from a certain sense of experience and design, and they're seeing the final result,

00:12:31 ◼   ► not the 20 versions that I threw away. And in those 20 versions that I threw away, there's

00:12:36 ◼   ► lots of nuggets and things that I'm like, oh, I need to revisit this later. Oh, I need

00:12:39 ◼   ► to revisit that, you know, this isn't that great in this current version and I wish it

00:12:42 ◼   ► was something else. And they're not seeing that. And I think ultimately what that does

00:12:46 ◼   ► is that it gives me an advantage in being able to continue to move faster and faster

00:12:51 ◼   ► and to make my app better and better because it's starting from a thoughtful place of starting

00:12:56 ◼   ► from this, you know, starting from scratch and building up rather than starting from,

00:13:01 ◼   ► you know, copying something and making some tweaks and adjustments. And so that's kind

00:13:04 ◼   ► of what I do. Largely, I'll just ignore them. You know, if I'm actually going through a

00:13:08 ◼   ► major redesign for Pedometer++. It will hopefully be out in the next couple weeks. And I will

00:13:13 ◼   ► feel a little funny if I put out this brand new redesign, the visually very different

00:13:18 ◼   ► than the old version, and all these apps immediately start looking like that one. I might reach

00:13:23 ◼   ► out to Apple a little bit and be like, "This is clearly just somebody who--this isn't just

00:13:28 ◼   ► a situation of somebody who happens to have something similar. Like, they're, you know,

00:13:31 ◼   ► consciously making efforts to copy exactly what I was doing." But, you know, by and large,

00:13:37 ◼   ► I just kind of ignored.

00:13:38 ◼   ► And like I said, the key I found in so many situations

00:13:41 ◼   ► as a developer is to just think, where

00:13:43 ◼   ► can I most productively and constructively

00:13:45 ◼   ► put my energy and time?

00:13:47 ◼   ► And this loops back to last week's episode,

00:13:50 ◼   ► which a lot of you gave me very great feedback about,

00:13:52 ◼   ► and I really appreciate.

00:13:54 ◼   ► That these struggles we have with things

00:13:56 ◼   ► like Twitter or social media or things

00:13:58 ◼   ► where we're putting our time and energy

00:14:00 ◼   ► into these relationships and conflicts

00:14:01 ◼   ► and whatever it is that ultimately aren't constructive,

00:14:04 ◼   ► it applies in so many areas.

00:14:06 ◼   ► And in this particular area, it's like, don't worry so much about what other people are

00:14:10 ◼   ► doing.

00:14:11 ◼   ► Focus on your own products and make them better and better and better.

00:14:13 ◼   ► And ultimately, I think that you'll end up in a much happier place.

00:14:17 ◼   ► You'll end up in a place that is much more productive that way.

00:14:19 ◼   ► You'll end up with better products and happier customers than if you get too wrapped up in

00:14:24 ◼   ► losing a day and a half to all kinds of back and forths and legal issues and those types

00:14:31 ◼   ► of things that ultimately aren't improving your products, that are just making you feel

00:14:34 ◼   ► a little bit better and potentially maybe reducing a little bit of customer confusion.

00:14:40 ◼   ► So anyway, that's kind of where I think on that. And that's it for today's show. As always,

00:14:43 ◼   ► if you have questions, comments, concerns, complaints, I'm on Twitter @_DavidSmith, David

00:14:47 ◼   ► at DevelopingPerspective.com. And otherwise, thanks, have a great week, happy coding, and

00:14:51 ◼   ► I'll talk to you later. Bye.