The Sad State of the Android Market..
Warning: this post is mostly a rant, with a bit exaggerated (but not much!) title to boot..
I’ve been meaning to write this one for a couple of months now, but never really found the time and actually got around to do it. So here goes. I started noticing a lot of games on the Android Market with familiar looking icons, and after closer inspection, it’s clear that most of the graphics have been stolen from Jewels. I have not downloaded the games, but I would hazard a guess that the sounds are also taken from Jewels for most of these clones.
Do a quick search for “Jewels” on the Android Market. What do you find? I counted 8 (that’s right, eight!) games that have graphics stolen from my game. Six (6) of those eight games have one of my Jewels graphics as icon image. One clone is the worst offender. It has stolen the graphics, the icon (yes, the actual Jewels-icon a couple of versions back) and get this… even the freaking app description is copied from my game! The best part — and the gist of this entire posting — the game is named Jewels.
Now let’s be realistic: “jewels” is a common word. (All those eight games have the word in their title; most probably there other clones with stolen assets with other names.) It’s not like I invented the word. But why on Earth does Android Market allow two apps (two games, both in the Casual-category) to share the exactly same name? Why? Especially when the copycat app clearly has stolen almost everything from the original app. I mean what the hell? Why couldn’t they check for the app name and prevent duplicate named apps from the Market? I can see them allowing same named apps for different categories, but I don’t understand the current policy at all. (Perhaps that other Jewels has some whitespace characters in its name, I don’t know, but frankly I see no reason why names like “Jewels_“, where _ is a space, should be allowed.)
The Market is also riddled with app spammers, developers (in the lowest possible meaning of the word) that pump out dozens of sub-standard apps and spam them in with different developer accounts. This is of course a whole different issue, and one that doesn’t really matter to me, but it lowers the quality of the marketplace on the whole. I feel that Google should do some cleaning up on the Market, get rid of all the crap — and of the spammed apps using stolen assets (the most obvious cases, at least).
All this “steal assets from a popular game, and name it similarly” is of course to get a share of the attention those popular games receive. I guess I should be flattered that people bother to steal those graphics? 
Nevertheless, I’m sure that more popular apps have it worse than I do: look at all those wanna-be Angry Birds -games on the Market. Just sad…
***
As you can see, I’m not thrilled with the Android Market as it is now, and I shall carefully consider whether to bring my future games to the platform at all. Apple has things far better on the App Store; the control is much tighter, but at least it keeps some of the crap out. And they don’t allow two apps with the same name, something that became clear to me with iJewels. Not to mention I’ve come to like the iOS-platform much more than Android, but that’s a different story..
This stealing assets thing is also one of the reasons why I still haven’t (and never will, it seems) added the music from iJewels to the Android-Jewels. It would be stolen the instant I hit the big ol’ Publish-button on the Market. 
Every word of that is true.
I also find the search algorithm of the Android Market to be of distressingly low-quality, even before taking into account Google’s involvement (which makes the scenario a nigh-unthinkable lapse from the giant of “search”).
If I want to find a Jewels game, I usually have to do battle with the search function to get to it…only to be greeted by an army of clones.
Reminds me of the tale of Lugaru on Mac Store
Jewels has been a great success from the number of downloads on Android, and I congratulate you on being the first and finest Jewels Android app!
Just wondering, has the ad revenue worked out for you?
I can understand your frustration. No one wants to work that hard to just be ripped off.
That said, isn’t Jewels just a clone of Bejeweled? As first glance I doubt many casual gamers would see a difference. Can you really get that upset about people stealing your ideas when you copied someone else’s?
Fair point in general, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about people using my assets (e.g. the graphics) in their own games, without permission. Ideas are ideas. Obviously Jewels is based on the same basic idea as is Bejeweled (I even give credit for that in the game), and Bejeweled is based on another game (Shariki, IIRC). I didn’t steal anything from them. The graphics and the code are all mine.
It’s different to “clone a game” with the same idea than to do a clone using stolen graphics and/or other assets.
I understand your frustration and have sympathy for you, but to look from another perspective, your code on CodePlex – before you removed it last year – had a very loose open-source license, shown below. This license gave people permission to do a lot with your software – even to sell it as-is with your name, logo, and copyright on it, and without owing you anything for doing so. As long as people follow it, they are not violating the license – as wrong as some of these uses may appear. So even though I have sympathy, you must look at your license and whether someone has truly violated it before you claim they “stole” your software or even assets contained in it. It looks like you inadvertently gave people permission to do more with your license than you wish you did.
“Jewels (http://www.codeplex.com/jewels)
Copyright (c) 2007, 2008, Mika Halttunen
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to
deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the
rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or
sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS
OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY
CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT,
TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.”
Again, fair points. It is true that the PC-version of Jewels had a very liberal license (the MIT one, in fact); this was completely intentional at the time. When releasing the game I thought it would be great if somebody found use for the thing. Nowadays, though, as I’m trying to run a business of sorts, I won’t be releasing my games that generously. I’m sure this makes sense.
To the matter at hand: it would indeed be legal for people to use my assets (from the PC-version), provided that they comply with the license. More specifically: “The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software“. I’m not a lawyer, but I reckon using the assets count as “a substantial portion”. As I said in the post, I have not tried those games, so it might be possible that some of them had used the PC-Jewels graphics and attributed me as is required by the license. I very highly doubt that, however (but perhaps I need to take a closer look, to be fair). You said it yourself: as long as people follow it, they are not violating the license. But if they don’t have the license attribution visible in the game, they are violating it.
Even if some of those clones would be using the original PC-Jewels graphics, I can guarantee that most of the are not. It would be much easier to just grab the assets from the Android-version, they’re in the correct format and size after all. And indeed, I can see just from the screenshots that they have done just that. I recognize the background images are from Android-version (they’re framed differently from the PC-version, including some other minor changes). Not to mention the menu graphics, they were made just for the Android-version. Of course, not all of those clones use all of the graphics, but the worst offenders are indeed using all of the Android-version graphics. I don’t even have to download them to be sure, it is evident from the screenshots.
And to be clear: the Android-version of Jewels is not released under a liberal license that allows people to take stuff from it and use as they wish.
Hi,
I just wanted to say as a huge fan of the game bejeweled, I was disappointed when I could not find it on the Android market, but there is many jewel swapping games like it so I downloaded one. It was ok – but extremely easy ( i haven’t lost yet and am on level 50). It wasn’t unitl I read this article here that I realized the game I have been playing is a rip off of yours. It is quite unfortunate that the Adroid market has allowed 2 games of the same name to be published (and stolen). At this time I am downloading your version which is truly better & more of a challenge.
Thanks for your blog, otherwise I would never have known. I am a convert and will be forever more wise when downloading apps in the future to help support actual developers & not stealers.
It has been 20+ days since the launch of the Amazon Appstore and we have noted a substantial amount of web traffic and positive publicity. Hopefully you have visited the new storefront and recognize that we are offering a better app market which ties into the cross-promotional strengths of our website (connecting physical goods to digital media).
Our Content Operations team is very thorough when checking submitted apps for: general functionality, malware, copyright or Intellectual Property (IP) infringements, and other factors which garner high quality apps.
What is preventing MHGames from increasing their brand awareness and reaching this new target audience?
I shall have to look into your Appstore, then.
Don’t know about your case, but in my case someone decompiled my app & recompiled it with his own ad ID. He made some changes – erased the EULA, versions data & changed the icon, but the help stayed the same (and my code). Multiple users pointed out the rip-off in the comments & someone sent me an e-mail. I sent Google DMCA notice & I’m still waiting for an answer…
The funny thing – my app hardly make any money anyhow.
Ok that’s even worse. I suspected people might be doing that, since it’s not that difficult with Java. (Another advantage iOS has over Android, although nowadays one could use the Android NDK..) Had you obfuscated your compiled code? Doesn’t really stop people from tampering with decompilation, though, but probably makes it a bit more unpleasant thing to do..
I love your game and play it all the time. I see you’re venting and maybe you should be just listen too but “steal assets from a popular game, and name it similarly” I wonder if Bejeweled feels the same about Jewels. Much respect and I really reworded this so many times so it wouldn’t come across like a fight starter. YOU’RE GAME IS NOT A CHEEP GIMMICK! It does not come across like an app spamer…just saying.
I’m having a bit trouble understanding what you’re saying there, Mako. The last part especially doesn’t make sense to me, sorry.
As for the Jewels name, remember that Jewels started as a XNA exercise, nothing more. I’m quite certain I just picked the first name that came into mind and wasn’t already an existing game name. I didn’t put much thought into it — and looking back now, I probably should have chosen something less common. Oh well, the name kinda stuck from there, no point changing it now.
I like the name. Freddy actually asked my basic question so never mind.
congratulations on you’re baby