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Comment by oneplusone | Hacker News Reader

Apple has guidelines on how to style the iPhone app's specifically to ensure consistency of the user experience. How does this do anything but hurt them? Do they really want every app developer to create their own style of chat bubble?

If they trademark the navigation bar at the top will they stop developers from using that as well?

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There's obviously some inconsistency going on here in the app approval process, but the main gist from Apple has always been the same; they don't want users getting confused about whether or not they are chatting it up on Chess Wars or via SMS.

My company was told something similar by Apple reps at an iPhoneDevCamp event: make sure the chat bubbles look different so as not to be confused with our native app.

They can request you don't use it as condition for access to their platform - claiming it's a trademark is different. The mark (in the EC at least) needs to be indicative of the origin of goods or services and needs to be distinctive in order to achieve that aim - chat bubbles are not distinctive and are not indicative that Apple Computers Inc. are providing the service. Fail IMO.

Let's be fair here. These are chat bubbles. They're not buttons or text boxes. There's no inconsistency in behavior between different versions in different UIs. They're just a pretty way of displaying a chat conversation. It's generally pretty easy to recognize when you're in a chat, and bubble shapes are distinctive. You could even use the tried-and-true text chat approach. This is reasonable as a way to avoid phishing-type scams where you fake IM or SMS to steal information.

The problem is that Apple has decided that people might get confused that they are sending SMS', when in fact they are not. And they are right, some people will get confused, it doesn't take much for people to get confused. And people generealy use visual clues, so if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and accepts input like a duck, it is a duck.

Aren't the bubbles part of the SDK's UI toolkit?

No.

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