App Store squatters may find loopholes as Apple cracks down

Squatting on app names in Apple’s App Store has, until now, been rather simple to pull off. After an initial $99 fee, any person could reserve as many application names as they wanted with no fear of repercussions. Apple has changed that with a new policy, and has now apparently begun to enforce it.

The policy reads something like this: if you don’t upload a binary within 90 days of staking your claim, you get a letter. If there’s no binary a month after the initial letter, Apple reclaims the name and deletes your app from iTunes Connect.

We first became aware of the new policy when developer Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software posted the following status on Twitter: “Apple’s coming after me for my ‘reserved’ app names not being uploaded. They may all start out as fart apps, to save the name.” It was around the same time when a letter to an undisclosed developer began making its way around the Internet that essentially stated the aforementioned terms.

Apple is more likely targeting habitual offenders rather than someone such as Jalkut, who has an existing Mac application that he plans to eventually port to iOS. Still, Jalkut raises an interesting point: despite Apple’s efforts, it is still nominally easy to get around the restriction by uploading a binary that does very little. Yes, Apple reviews any binary that is uploaded to iTunes Connect, but a developer can easily upload something never intended for publication by setting the release date far into the future. Additionally, offenders may simply reclaim an application name for three more months once Apple releases it back into the wild.

How prevalent this behavior is, though, is anyone’s guess. An informal survey of nine developers we spoke to found that, collectively, they had five application names reserved in a manner that might be considered “squatting.” The majority of those developers had none on reserve, however, and only one developer had more than one name reserved. To our knowledge, no one has sold a name claimed on iTunes Connect like squatters do with domains, but it’s still nice to see Apple taking a proactive step to prevent squatters from infiltrating the App Store.