imothee

I woke up this morning to see some really confusing news. An app with the exact same name as my soon to be released app had been released by Apple. What do I do now?

Some backstory.

I had begun work on this app in 2009 but got distracted thanks to a hectic life (marriage etc) and had early this year started working on it again. I registered the *app.com domain and submitted a basic binary to Apple for Review. I pulled the binary and began working on it, trying a whole heap of ideas and talking to family and friends on what they'd want in the app.

I work a day job and money is tight so I don't have tons of time to spend, and definitely not the money to register the trademark locally (Australia) let alone the US. I'd say I was about 2 months off of release at this stage after spending a ton of time working with server components to store and share the information on a budget. The site is also blank as I didn't have the bandwidth to set it up nicely and I wanted to be a bit stealthy as the name gives an extremely obvious indication of what it does.

So now Apple has released an App with the exact same spelling as my app (and obviously a very similar functionality based on the name) while mine is still in iTunesConnect ready for binary submission and approval.

I just feel gutted, I'm not sure I can release the App now (since it directly competes) and I don't want to rebrand all the artwork and domain. If I do release it, I feel like I'd look bad for trying to hang off Apples success and not sure I can cope with the support required for users who install my app and wonder why their friends aren't on it. I didn't even get a notice from Apple about any of this. Do they even check for existing apps?

Does anyone have any input on where to go from here?

Thanks