HTC Sends Cease & Desist To Developer Who Made Similar Android Widgets
from the can't-compete? dept
Tim K alerts us to the news that phone maker HTC has sent a cease & desist nastygram to the developers of an Android widget that certainly had a similar look and feel to HTC's own Sense UI. Except, many people claim that this newer widget, from LevelUp Studios, was actually better. LevelUp apparently has no interest in fighting this, and are ditching the widget, but it seems that they could have a decent argument here. The bigger question, though, is why HTC is bothering? I'm actually a big HTC fan. My last two mobile phones have both been from HTC, and I had been expecting my next one to be from HTC as well. But this sort of bullying for no good reason makes me wonder why I'd want to support a company like that. Honestly, what was HTC "losing" by letting this widget be created? This seems like bullying just for the sake of bullying.
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Filed Under: android, cease & desist, mobile apps, widgets
Companies: htc
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Sense UI
It's all about ego.
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I don't get it
I don't like the fact that they are getting nasty about it. For gosh sake! Can't you let people have a choice?
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reverse it
What was HTC gaining? Not very much, they are losing control over their product, they are losing a brand product that differentiates them from the other players, etc. In a more and more crowded smart phone market, HTC has continued to differentiate themselves by not having products that are just "me too". I think they are doing the right thing by protecting the parts of the market that make the HTC experience unique to HTC products.
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Re: reverse it
Ever head of the PDA? Why'd they die out? Maybe nobody cared for them because they were... how'd you put it? "doing the right thing by protecting the parts of the market that make the ... experience unique to (their) products." Yep, they protected their unique user experienceness right out of the marketplace. Good job there. *Pat on the back*
"History repeats itself. Those who fail to learn from the failures of others are doomed to repeat them."
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Re: Re: reverse it
Hey that my line .... ;) ... kind of
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Re: reverse it
the plaint and world-view of the status quo defender. sadly for the anti-mikes' of the world, the future is not about control, it's about how to make money when you've lost control; to technology and irritable consumers:
http://www.mediafuturist.com/the-end-of-control-essays.html
they were gaining: a larger network surrounding their products and company, energized developers, attentive purchasers, engagement with with fans.
PFFT, gone.
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Re: Re: reverse it
It isn't about stopping development, it's just keeping control of the key apps that make the phone unique to other offerings.
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negative
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Re: reverse it
In other words, they were gaining everything they should have wanted to gain.
What were they losing by letting this widget on their phones? A little market share in the app world maybe, which would likely have been more than made up for by the gained customers in the phone market when they realized that HTC phones weren't afraid to offer the best apps out there... Smooth move HTC, if it weren't for Google, you'd probably be looking at a very dim future.
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Re: reverse it
In this case, the developer is not Motorola, but you could potentially download the widget onto a Motorola Droid and make it look all HTC-ish -- thereby nixing some of the advantage the Eris might have had over the Droid.
That said, it requires quite a few jumps. I imagine the number of consumers who say "Oh, I'd get an Eris because it's so pretty, but I can just download the widgets onto a Droid and get a keyboard instead" is fairly small.
I am also very much alarmed how you can copyright or trademark UI elements and "look-and-feel". I mean, imagine if someone had copyrighted the scroll-bar. We'd have like a gajillion variations of the scroll-bar to get around the copyright, most of them would suck (e.g. see that thing on Google Wave), and users would be horribly confused over the design inconsistency.
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They lost control of their product when they got conned by Verizon and let them market The HTC Eris as a Droid. Please explain how they gain from that?
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Re:
I was considering the ERIS but if HTC is doing to stay this stupid I will let my money go elsewhere. The programmer should just alter the output enough so it doesn't look as much like the HTC crapware.
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Re:
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They aren't "ditching" the widget.
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Re: They aren't "ditching" the widget.
See, solutions aren't hard to find.
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Re: Re: They aren't "ditching" the widget.
See, if I was downloading the widget onto a phone manufactured by an HTC competitor, there's likely already a look-and-feel mismatch between the manufacturer's widgets and the one I downloaded. So long as the replacement is reasonably "pretty", there's no loss.
On the other hand, for an HTC owner, one of the reasons I may have downloaded that widget was because it offered better functionality and integrated well with the other parts of the Sense UI. Now that the replacement looks different, part of its original value to me is lost.
I mean, there are Apple users who insist only on downloading third party software that conforms to Apple's look-and-feel. Imagine how'd pissed they be if Apple started saying that only core OS X apps could use the brushed metal look.
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It isn't about stopping development, it's just keeping control of the key apps that make the phone unique to other offerings.
You do realize all Beautiful Widgets was? It was a clock app and also showed weather info with the clock? If you hold that as a key app then HTC is going to have some serious issues.
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WHY???
If they were just betting on the small guy being afraid of the legal hammer, thats criminal.
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Re: WHY???
And standard operating procedure.
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Open Development?
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HTC phones are junk....
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GoodYear Sends Cease & Desist To Firestone because they made tires that are also round with grooves refered to as "threads".
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Re:
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