Recently, a free word puzzle game "Wordle" in the United States is out of the loop! In addition to having more than one million visits per day and a large number of loyal players, the super high popularity has also attracted many plagiarists to launch the "clone App" with the same name and function, and triggered a public opinion storm. Finally, because the public opinion is too large, it has attracted the attention of Apple. On January 12, Apple removed a number of apps that copied "Wordle" from the App Store in one fell swoop. What exactly is going on here? Let's take a look at it together
Wordle's popular plagiarism apps are emerging in an endless stream
Wordle is a seemingly mediocre word guessing game, but it has 2.7 million players worldwide (launched since the end of last year) and is still exploding. The overall gameplay of the game is simple, after entering the Wordle game, the player will have five chances to guess a five-letter word every day. During the game, you will be prompted whether the letter is in the correct answer and whether the location is correct, as shown in the following figure:
Screenshot of wordle game page
Meaning of different color blocks:
Green: Indicates that the letter is in the answer and the location is correct;
Yellow: Indicates that the letter is in the answer, but not in this position;
Gray: Indicates that this letter is not in the answer.
In this game, each person can only challenge one question per day, and players around the world challenge the same question every day.
It is this simple gameplay that makes it more than one million visits per day, and also forms a benign social atmosphere in the player group. There are countless people sharing "achievements" on the Internet every day, and players have even created a mysterious way to share them (as shown below) to prevent the problem, don't panic when you see such emoji dynamics ~ they are just showing their Wordle records.
Emoji tweets on the extranet
The popularity of the game created by himself should have been a happy thing, but the developer Josh Wardle was not happy, because with the popularity of the game, the App Store appeared a number of "difficult to distinguish between true and false" counterfeit Apps, with Wordle traffic to earn a lot of money, these Apps either play, interface similar, and some even directly use "Wordle" as the app name:
Screenshot of the details page of a plagiarized App
The emergence of plagiarized Apps not only makes developers who insist on not charging upset, players are also excited, but plagiarists do not care, some people not only post sarcasm, but also take advantage of the heat to make a wave of small profits, but do not know that their plagiarized Apps have been targeted by Apple.
Apple took down a number of plagiarized apps in one fell swoop
With the escalation of public opinion and user complaints, the plagiarism storm has attracted Apple's attention, and on January 12, Apple removed a batch of "cloned Apps" from the App Store. If you look closely, you can see that these are all plagiarists of the "Wordle" game that just went online in January:
Partially removed plagiarism game
However, at present, Xiaobian found in the data retrieval of Qimai, and found a few apps suspected of plagiarizing "Wordle", these Apps were launched after January 12, 2022, the game name or interface is similar to "Wordle", as shown in the following figure:
Whether Apple will remove these suspected plagiarism apps in the follow-up, The Qimai Research Institute will continue to pay attention to...
Coincidentally, do you remember "synthetic watermelon"?
"Wordle" as a web game, but by plagiarists to make the App on the Shelves App Store, this situation actually appears around us from time to time, such as last year's popular "synthetic big watermelon", originally an H5 small game, and later by different developers "moved" to the App Store:
A similar situation has recently appeared in the "Summoning Dragon" launched with the developer, and a search on the App Store will appear a series of similar apps belonging to different developers:
In addition to the example of this kind of web game to app acquisition, there are also some developers who will follow the example of the big hot app and get the amount by rubbing the heat. For example, the pirated App "faceapp" that was successfully installed before was quickly updated after the genuine "FaceApp" of the fire was removed from the shelves, which can be described as fake and real.
epilogue
Although there are countless apps that rub heat and wipe the edge ball, wordle rarely appears, which not only triggers a public opinion storm, but also a large number of "cloned Apps" have also been removed from apple shelves. How the follow-up development, Xiaobian will continue to pay attention to ~ Finally, it is a reminder: in the promotion process, we must act cautiously and obtain reasonable quantity