Apple pulls cloned games from App Store

Definitely a good point, but they're such a cash cow that you have to figure they will mysteriously avoid this new policy.

Honestly, the case mentioned in the article is a direct scam in which the user is tricked into buying something thinking it is related to the original game. This is IMHO much worse than the zynga "ripoffs".

That being said, I am also not fond of resourceful studios cloning other successful games.

I think that it really only applies in the games space. The basic features of most utility apps is pretty easily defined by the problem they're attempting to solve. The basic functionality of all Twitter apps, for example, are pretty much only what the Twitter API allows. They can do more than that(historical caching, thread aggregation, etc), but the basic functionality is to read your stream and post tweets.

Except that the App industry is not a direct profit maker for Apple at all. It is an ecosystem that boosts hardware sales. What matters is not the number of apps or the cash handed out to developers, it is end-user happiness. That's what leads to such seemingly incoherent decisions.

Anecdotally, the apps with good ratings that I saw in the App Store charts have never been rip-offs.

There is one paragraph, and it clearly says "Please note this is not the actual Temple Run game". There's plenty of real examples of people trying to confuse players into purchasing screenshots, this is not one.

>>>Temple Jump, however, was a scam intended to trick customers into thinking the app is related to Temple Run. It had a similar icon, vague description, and a single screenshot that did not show any gameplay.

Zynga does clone games (like nearly every studio does). However, their games are clearly distinct and not intended to trick customers of a competing product.