This app pretty much goes against everything Apple is trying to achieve with 'Privacy First'. Personally, I would have never used it because routing all traffic through their vpn seems malicious in itself, but a non-tech savvy user may not understand the consequence of allowing that.
We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
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Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#22I know lots of people on HN aren’t a fan of patents- either because of patent trolls or because they believe that patents harm FOSS. So knowing that, I expect a few people to disagree with what I say. This is exactly what patents are supposed to protect you from. If you have a good idea, then file a patent and protect yourself. If it’s worth $500k per year then it’s worth having a patent lawyer help you do it right.…
Ideas aren't patentable. Execution/implementation of the tech is patentable and in this case, they would have to patent the use of VPN to track usage. That's easily by-passable as Apple doesn't need to do this via a VPN. They have built the tech in the iOS itself.
Same reason snapchat couldn't patent their stories or disappearing messages ideas and got copied by FB and Instagram.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#23I know lots of people on HN aren’t a fan of patents- either because of patent trolls or because they believe that patents harm FOSS. So knowing that, I expect a few people to disagree with what I say. This is exactly what patents are supposed to protect you from. If you have a good idea, then file a patent and protect yourself. If it’s worth $500k per year then it’s worth having a patent lawyer help you do it right.…
Having a patent would solve the insult to injury of the feature being copied, but not the injury itself of the app being yanked off the store.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#24I know lots of people on HN aren’t a fan of patents- either because of patent trolls or because they believe that patents harm FOSS. So knowing that, I expect a few people to disagree with what I say. This is exactly what patents are supposed to protect you from. If you have a good idea, then file a patent and protect yourself. If it’s worth $500k per year then it’s worth having a patent lawyer help you do it right.…
Unfortunately you touched on what makes this specific case a problem: Their solution is non-patentable. They failed to do a appropriate post-mortem of their business and instead resorted to blaming Apple for their failure.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#25[deleted]
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#26On the flipside, this app looks like it was kind of a hack to get working. "Tunnel all of your traffic through our VPN to get tracking of social media use." It doesn't surprise me that Apple would want to offer first-party support.
> looks like it was kind of a hack
Where do you think you are?
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#27> A month before being removed from the App Store, the app raked in ~$45,000 in revenue. This means the product was operating at a $500,000 annual run rate.
No, this means you had a revenue of $45k over one month (congrats! It’s a number to be proud of in itself). This artificial extrapolation of sales data to get attention grabbing headlines is so frustrating.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#28[deleted]
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#29I know lots of people on HN aren’t a fan of patents- either because of patent trolls or because they believe that patents harm FOSS. So knowing that, I expect a few people to disagree with what I say. This is exactly what patents are supposed to protect you from. If you have a good idea, then file a patent and protect yourself. If it’s worth $500k per year then it’s worth having a patent lawyer help you do it right.…
But patents wouldn't protect them in this instance. Patents are explicitly for implementations, not abstractions/ideas. I highly doubt they could get a patent on an implementation sufficiently abstract that would block any statistical tracking/monitoring of app usage, or at least one that wouldn't run into prior art issues.
Apple isn't tunneling everything through a VPN to track it.
Re: We launched an app with $500k annual revenue, and then Apple copied it
#30May I say the title should be taken with a grain of salt. From the article: > A month before being removed from the App Store, the app raked in ~$45,000 in revenue. This means the product was operating at a $500,000 annual run rate. It's an extrapolation, from the first month.
That plus they are talking about extrapolated "revenue". They didn't mention what the server costs were for having to handle the traffic of that many users. Server costs for such would be pretty high. Also other operating costs, development costs etc. Revenue doesn't matter, profit does.