John Gruber, on Widgetsmith:

It’s rocketed to the #1 spot on the App Store’s Productivity list. My teenage son, out of the blue, asked me if I’d heard about it — not iOS 14 widgets in general, but Widgetsmith specifically. A well-deserved hit product.

First things first, here’s an App Store link to Widgetsmith. It’s free to download, with in-app purchases. Give it a look.

Moving on:

And but so of course the ripoff scammers are already doing their thing, and the App Store is welcoming them. Search for “Widgetsmith” — the exact name of Smith’s app — and the first app in the results is not Widgetsmith but a name-alike ripoff called, I swear, “Widgetsmith – Color Widgets”. This utterly shameless ripoff, replete with a ham-fisted knockoff of the icon to boot, is listed above the actual Widgetsmith, despite the fact that the actual Widgetsmith is currently the #1 app in Productivity and has over 53,000 overwhelmingly positive reviews. The ripoff app has 25 5-star ratings, one 1-star rating, and one written review, which reads, verbatim, “Thank developer for making such great app especially for iOS 14!” The entire description of the ripoff app is written in similar broken English.

As John notes in his update, the “ripoff” version of Widgetsmith is now gone, more a testament to the power of the press, I suspect, than any automated App Store takedown process.

Read Gruber’s take on all this. It’s right on the money. How does this sort of thing continue to happen? Is it a sign of the complexity of the App Store, an overwhelming number of titles to police?

If that is the case, if the volume of available apps is more than Apple can properly manage, might that not be a fair argument for reducing that 30% fee (less service, reduced fee)?

Oh, and props for that headline, Gruber. Delicious.