<i>the reviewer rejected it because Sign in with Apple was enabled but still prompted for a user’s name</i><p>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 <i>so many</i> 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?
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.<p>[1] <a href="https://youtu.be/IzH54FpWAP0&t=530" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/IzH54FpWAP0&t=530</a>
<i>> Inkwell is listed on Apple’s own trademark page.</i><p>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).<p>But it does sound like the whole app name is in conflict with a registered Apple trademark. It's unlikely to ever be approved.
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.<p>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.<p>[1]: <a href="https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/86733442" rel="nofollow">https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/86733442</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/78126699" rel="nofollow">https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/78126699</a>
The top comment there is not correct. You do not have to "defend" trademarks or they "expire."<p>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.<p>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.
You definitely need to provide evidence of use.<p><a href="https://www.dreyfus.fr/en/2025/03/18/proof-of-use-in-the-united-states-a-cornerstone-for-trademark-protection/#Legal_Requirements_for_Maintaining_Trademark_Registration" rel="nofollow">https://www.dreyfus.fr/en/2025/03/18/proof-of-use-in-the-uni...</a>
> You lose a trademark if it becomes generic<p>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.<p><a href="https://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-rename-skydrive-settle-trademark-dispute/" rel="nofollow">https://www.geekwire.com/2013/microsoft-rename-skydrive-sett...</a>
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."<p>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.<p>I wonder if there was ever an epic Monster sugarwater vs Monster Cable showndown.
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 <i>happy</i> Apple is enforcing.<p>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]<p>The reviewer is probably just trying to follow policy, when other reviewers have made exceptions. Hopefully there's a way to point to the <i>many</i> exceptions and get it approved after all? Is there a way to escalate/appeal to get a different reviewer?<p>[1] <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/search?term=inkwell">https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/search?term=inkwell</a>
> no way to delete an account you create<p>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<p>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".<p>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".
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."
<i>used</i>. Apple <i>used</i>. 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.<p>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.
maybe apple should have changed ipod to avoid confusing it with a pre-existing music device:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_6_POD" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_6_POD</a>
Or Swift, to avoid confusion with the scripting language Swift - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_language)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_(parallel_scripting_lang...</a><p>Or iPad <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18669394" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/news/business-18669394</a><p>Etc.<p>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.
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.<p>Mediocre ones seem to cause the most problems.
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