Earlier today, the App Store was overflowing with games ripping off a viral web app. | Illustration by William Joel / The Verge
Has Apple taken action against apps that cloned the popular web game Wordle? They have now disappeared from the App Store, after several publications (including The Verge) called out a flood of copycats so blatant as to be named āWordleā and that featured the same gameplay and UI, each taking advantage of the fact that developer Josh Wardle didnāt create an Apple app of his own. While weāre still seeing a few clones on the App Store, they donāt use the Wordle name.
The clone apps had a spotlight shone on them today, when one developer started bragging about how many downloads his version of Wordle was getting. Following some intense backlash from the community, he set his account to private, but people had already started finding many other apps like it on the App Store.
The search results for Wordle at 5PM ET today, showing two clones.
The search results for Wordle at 8:08PM ET ā the first results are now an app from five years ago, and a story about Words With Friends 2.
Apple didnāt immediately respond to The Vergeās request for confirmation that it was the one that took action against the Wordle-alikes, but it seems vanishingly unlikely that each developer decided to take down their app in the space of about an hour. If Apple really is initiating a crackdown on the apps, itās tipping the scales significantly to protect the original game.
While there have been similar high-profile situations in the past ā as Protocol points out, Flappy Bird and Threes vs 2048 come to mind ā itās hard to think of a recent example where Apple stepped in as heavily as it seems to have done today. Apple does have language about copycats in its developer guidelines, but itās notably vague: āCome up with your own ideas,ā section 4.1 reads. āDonāt simply copy the latest popular app on the App Store, or make some minor changes to another appās name or UI and pass it off as your own.ā
There have been questions about how Apple would deal with blatant clones, as itās seemingly let things slide in some instances. With disappearance of the Wordle-alikes from the App Store, we may have gotten a precedent for how similar is too similar.