There are many people who were more than happy that Amazon’s Android Appstore has been introduced, as they believe that this will prove to be a timely boost to the Android ecosystem as it is still behind the industry benchmark – the Apple App Store. Of course, this has caused Apple to “congratulate” Amazon in a different manner, by suing them since Apple currently holds the trademark to “App Store”, as it is used in both iOS and OS X platforms. Of course, Amazon isn’t alone in this fight as Microsoft did challenge the viability of the trademark a few months back, claiming that it was “too generic”, and Amazon has followed suit after being slapped with litigation from Cupertino’s legal eagles.
It seems that truncating the term to “Appstore” is just not good enough by Apple’s rules, and according to logic, while Apple did their bit by popularizing the term, “apps” has long been around for a long, long time before the iPhone was even thought up of. To put it in perspective, the argument goes like this – trademarking the term “app store” is somewhat similar to trying to trademark “grocery store”.
It really remains to be seen just how much longer Apple is able to hold on to the App Store name, as their filing for a trademark is far from being approved at the moment, and in the immediate future. What do you think of the whole thing? Live and let live?
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