Why is Inkwell stuck in review | Hacker News Reader

Why is Inkwell stuck in review

manton.org

153 pointsspeckx49 comments

Steve Jobs on cell phone companies: "We're not very good at going through orifices to get to the end users." [1] Today, Apple is the orifice.

[1] https://youtu.be/IzH54FpWAP0&t=530

of course you don’t wanna go through somebody else’s orifice

"the most personal computer"

Apples and bowling balls.

Your clip is about Apple reaching customers for a subscription or hardware, via third parties' marketing channels.

Sign In With Apple is a Single Sign-On service like any other. Something a user can elect to use for their convenience, or not.

the reviewer rejected it because Sign in with Apple was enabled but still prompted for a user’s name

When Sign in with Apple was new, I thought this - not needing to give any personal information to services using it - was one of its selling points. But so many services require you to create an account with them after signing in with Apple that for a long time I’ve thought I was misremembering. Are they all actually just breaking Apple’s terms?

> Apple also wanted more explicit terms of service and privacy policy links, so I cluttered up our welcome screen with more buttons.

This sort of starts from the perspective that a privacy policy is not important, and I get why people might think that, but I think it's a harmful perspective.

Having an explicit policy about how you handle user data is far more useful than ignoring the problem and pretending that you are good for privacy because you don't collect data for ads. Almost every app collects data in some way and it's important to lay those out and be explicit about them.

This is an attitude I see from a lot of small developers, and I think it's something devs need to get better at.

Most users have no interest in reading the privacy policy, and those who do will have no trouble finding it in some 'About' menu.

it should be there before you start using the app though

Right, It should be included in the app store page. Apple should have a specific place for it and it should be required.

> Inkwell is listed on Apple’s own trademark page.

I had an app rejected, because it had the word "Finder" in its title ("Virtual Meeting Finder"). I had to change the name of the app, and it wasn't too big a deal, because the original name was fairly unimaginative (as it was supposed to be).

But it does sound like the whole app name is in conflict with a registered Apple trademark. It's unlikely to ever be approved.

With a previously registered trademark -- the article says it has been "listed as 'dead”' by the US Patent & Trademark Office" and unused for decades.

Also trademarks have context. These reviews appear to completely ignore the nuance of trademark law.

I don't think it matters. It's their store, and they can do it. I suspect that if Inkwell was trademarked (which it sounds like it's not), they could bully through the reviewers. Apple certainly didn't have any legal standing to deny my app name, and I likely could have bullied them into approving it, but it wasn't worth the agita.

I do have a registered trademark (not for an app name, though). It's a really painful process. I can see why folks wouldn't want to go through that for every app name. I don't bother, with most of mine, but I do search for other registered marks.

The top comment there is not correct. You do not have to "defend" trademarks or they "expire."

You lose a trademark if it becomes generic, regardless of how hard you tried to keep it from being so. Obviously if you let a bunch of actual infringements slide you're on the way to becoming generic, but all that matters is whether the trademark IS generic.

But, when lawyers write letters to people saying "you can't say escalator or Zamboni" you can just ignore them. Using a trademark in writing in a way that a trademark owner does not like is not infringement.

In the business, we often refer to that sort of reminder activity as "defending" against genericism. Practice varies by country but the point is often to show that you are not passively allowing the trade mark to become generic. Yes, you can often ignore letters (unless they request an answer or make a threat, which might be a different situation) - but it's usually a good idea to spend some time looking at it from the other person's perspective first.

Yeah, but there are a TON of things that trademark lawyers do that are counter-productive. I put vaguely aggressive letters from trademark owners in that category, such as Monster energy drinks thinking they get to control how others use the word "monster."

I remember when the Apple logo stickers Apple packed in had a little (R), which was later dropped, since it's ugly and not legally required. But no doubt some lawyer advised putting it there to begin with.

The Monster example is funny. An attorney friend of mine had a job that required him to go after everyone in the world who used the word "Monster", because their client, Monster Cable, thought they owned the word in every sense and context.

I wonder if there was ever an epic Monster sugarwater vs Monster Cable showndown.

That brings up an interesting point about the ethics that attorneys have to follow. (Not an attorney myself but have relatives who are, so someone please correct me if I get a detail or two wrong). Attorneys are supposed to represent their client to the best of their ability, even if what the client wants done is stupid. The attorney can advise and say "Hey listen, filing that lawsuit is dumb and a waste of your time and money, you have zero chance of winning" but if the client says "I don't care, file the lawsuit anyway" then the attorney has to file the suit, even if they know the client has no chance of winning. There are some professional lines that attorneys are not allowed to cross, such as misrepresenting the content of legal cases they cite (lawyers have gotten dinged for doing so accidentally by not double-checking LLM-written documents before filing them, and citing hallucinated cases or misrepresenting the content of real cases that were cited). But as long as they don't cross those lines, attorneys have to do whatever the client asks them to do, even if they know it's stupid. Their job is to represent the client's opinions, not their own.

Monster Jobs and Monster Cable came into conflict over the .monster TLD. (It went to the job board, but they abandoned the TLD a few years later, as both the company and brand TLDs went into a decline.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.monster

> You lose a trademark if it becomes generic

And this is my biggest gripe with products from well-known companies that use already generic terms like "Apple", "Word", "X", or "Inkwell". I understand claiming exclusivity of words like "Microsoft Word", but not for the word "Word" itself.

Yeah where does it become a violation. Like if i wrote an app called wordsmith, and it does basically what word does, let you edit documents, is that really a trademark violation? Because i used the word word?

Considering Microsoft wasn't allowed to use SkyDrive as a name for cloud storage because Sky is registered for unrelated purposes, I would assume using the same trademark in a directly competing product would not be allowed.

https://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-rename-skydrive-sett...

You definitely need to provide evidence of use.

https://www.dreyfus.fr/en/2025/03/18/proof-of-use-in-the-uni...

Needs to be generic in the United States, and only the United States... which is funny considering the global jurisdiction US courts often assume.

I just looked this up. Instagram currently owns the most relevant live trademark for "INKWELL" [1] (class 009). Apple's registration [2] is indeed dead / cancelled.

You could possibly try to register the "INKWELL" trademark for an RSS reader, since that seems quite differentiated from Instagram's claim, but IANAL, so who knows how successful that process would be.

[1]: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/86733442

[2]: https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/78126699

I mean, a lot of these sound entirely reasonable. No way to report or block Micro.blog comments, the Sign In With Apple button didn't work, no way to delete an account you create. The way the author is trying to minimize these seems disingenuous. These seem like things I'm happy Apple is enforcing.

The trademark one sounds like the main problem. Obviously, for example, Apple won't let you register an app called "GarageBand". In this case, "Inkwell" seems like a dead Apple trademark but that is still listed. But I do see that there are two iPhone apps simply called "Inkwell" and at least six more that start with "Inkwell", e.g. "Inkwell: Private Micro Journal". [1]

The reviewer is probably just trying to follow policy, when other reviewers have made exceptions. Hopefully there's a way to point to the many exceptions and get it approved after all? Is there a way to escalate/appeal to get a different reviewer?

[1] https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/search?term=inkwell

> no way to delete an account you create

In here it sounds like this is a client to a third party service. Mail.app and Thunderbird don't have buttons to delete my Gmail account

I do agree all of this seems basically like "sure, fine". Just seems rough to get pinged with all of these in a slow stream, and having wall clock time go waaaaaay up for it.

The author says "so almost everyone is going to have an existing Micro.blog account that they can delete from the web".

The key word seems to be "almost". So it sounds like the app let you create accounts but not delete accounts. That's why I'm saying that it seems disingenuous of the author to be complaining. If you don't allow for account creation, then you don't need to allow for deletion. But if you have a creation flow in-app, you need a deletion flow in-app. You don't get to hide around assumptions around "almost".

Makes sense, yeah.

> In here it sounds like this is a client to a third party service.

It's not, Micro.blog is a service made and run by the author.

Sort of buried the lede here -- Apple uses the Inkwell name and has a trademark. This is just not going to get approved. Or, to quote Jobs talking to the iPodRip developer "Change your apps name. Not that big of a deal."

used. Apple used. It's legally a dead trademark, so Apple is claiming ownership of something they've already abandoned, but enforcing that nobody else can reclaim it, despite being a good name. That's not right, they don't just get to name squat.

What's legal doesn't matter, it's their store, if they want to claim they own the word Pear too they can do that.

I think holding that kind of power over devices people own is problematic, but I seem to be in the minority here.

Amusingly, a bunch of series of teen shows used to use "Pear PC" to get around the trademark issue on all their on screen technology...

+1 .. the problem isn't that Apple is denying their app, the problem is the developer decided to submit it to the Apple store.

Fun fact: this same process is how Vietnam got its name. Their earlier proposal of Nam Viet had fallen out of use, but still couldn't get approval.

Perhaps you’re right. Apple's App Store review can be a rough process. Then again, a search of “Inkwell” in the App Store shows plenty of apps that are named “Inkwell”, many of then writing-related.

Oh I didn't say they'd be consistent. But once it's raised, it's going to be really tough.

Agreed. Vanishingly few enforcers have ever said "wait, we let other people do it? Ohhhh go ahead!"

Much more extreme example, I read a court case where the cops were really annoyed the perp told them they should've been enforcing $muchWorseCrime elsewhere. Judge wasn't a fan either.

maybe apple should have changed ipod to avoid confusing it with a pre-existing music device:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_6_POD

Or Swift, to avoid confusion with the scripting language Swift - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_lang...

Or iPad https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18669394

Etc.

With Apple, being a corporation and not a moral actor, it comes down to “might makes right” when it comes to trademark and other IP laws.

They probably shouldn't have named iOs after the Cisco operating system and iPhone after the Cisco phone too.

The terrible consequences of App Review is how dependent you are on whether the App Reviewer you get is either very good at their job or very bad at their job.

Mediocre ones seem to cause the most problems.

Ai soon.

Deeply doubtful.

Did wonder if the reviewer knew the esoteric history of Inkwell themselves or if a tool pulled it for them.

Maybe they always scroll that trademarks page, they're just really thorough.

My mode with app stores is that unless I explicitly need access to device features, a web app is what I will build instead. And I'll work very hard to never put app store reviews on the critical path to anything I care about or invest in. Including having to depend on features not accessible by a browser. I'm not going through jump through hoops to be exposed to app store reviewer abuse, arbitrary delays when releasing, and all the rest. Why would I? Why would I give veto power to any other company over every release I do? Why should I pay them for the privilege? Why would I want to hand over 30% of my revenue (or whatever it is these days)?.It just doesn't make sense.

In any case, Apps are mostly irrelevant these days. Ten years ago people cared about being in the top 10 apps in the app store. That ship sailed a long time ago. Not a chance. Forget it. not going to happen. App stores as a discovery mechanism for your application are dead as a door nail as far as I can see. Apple and Google ran this into the ground. If you don't find another way to tell people about your app, they'll never find it. So, why bother with them at all? Just engineer around them.

Make a nice webapp instead. Maybe package it up as a PWA. You can do a lot of stuff in browsers these days. Signups and payments happen on the web so you need a web first experience anyway. That's why many apps look like their web version these days; they are mostly just that with some minor window dressing for things like notifications and maybe a menu or two are actually native. Just skip that. Notifications are mainly annoying and nobody cares about your menus having slightly nicer "native" toggles or whatever.

What's crazy is how 1/2 these are so legit and we want Apple doing this (plausibly) and the other 1/2 is ugly bureaucracy and power leverage.