I am as sick of the Doodle meme in iOS games as anyone – it’s unoriginal and quite simply boring. But trying to claim that you own the Doodle term or art style seems a bit absurd. Doodle Jump itself isn’t even unique – it just got many things right. It’s an old art style applied to a game type that’s been around forever.

via 148apps.com

This is the sort of thing where I wish people would just do the right thing, before the lawyers need to get involved.

Claiming trademark on “doodle” does seem preposterous. But I can’t say that I don’t understand at least a little bit why Lima Sky would be frustrated. Hundreds of developers are making money with crappy products by throwing “doodle” in their titles, hoping that unsuspecting customers will somehow associate their crap app with Doodle Jump.

That isn’t to say all “doodle” apps are in this category, but many, many are. People are doing the same with Angry Birds, Cut the Rope—pretty much any app that has seen a degree of success.

Of course, if users would stop buying these knockoffs, the problem would be solved. But that isn’t going to happen. At the same time, calling in the lawyers isn’t necessarily going to earn the Lima Sky guys much goodwill in the development community. These guys, until today, had a reputation for being a couple of nice fellas. That’s bound to change really fast.

It’s a page from Apple’s playbook, of course. Apple has sent thousands of cease and desist letters to companies and websites using “pod” and other Apple-product-related terms. It’s never sat well with me, because I don’t like the behavior on either side of the issue. And often innocent people and companies get caught in the middle of those two sides.

Perhaps a better solution for the App Store would be for Apple, as curator, to simply start rejecting these cheap knockoffs instead of approving them. After all, Apple reserves the right to reject any app, and a crying developer wouldn’t get much sympathy if he or she blogged about his or her ripoff app not getting approved. It even says right in the App Store rules that apps that don’t add value or that copy the features of other apps that are already in the store can be subject to rejection.

“We don’t need any more fart apps.” They can even just stamp that on every cheap ‘Doodle’ knockoff rejection letter.

But Apple gets enough bad PR about App Store rejection that they wouldn’t want to add fuel to that fire. It would probably do serious damage to their claim that the vast majority of apps are approved.

But if the store ends up getting filled with nothing but crappy ripoffs of the few good apps that were in there in the first place, then what’s the point of curating at all?

This move makes almost no sense to me. The “open” argument doesn’t hold water, as other codecs are just as likely to be limited by patents as h.264. And there’s nothing open about Flash, which is built in to Chrome. It’s a tired old argument. And we’ve seen plenty of evidence that Google doesn’t really care about open, anyway. So that can’t be the reason.

More importantly, all current Android phones have H.264 hardware decoding support built in. They don’t have any hardware support built in for any other kind of video. Which means that dropping H.264 support in the browser will lead to choppier, battery-draining video on all Android phones. They could keep h.264 support in the mobile browser, I suppose, but then, why drop it on the desktop? Doesn’t that just completely erode your ‘open’ argument, even to the blindest of fanboys?

Now, perhaps Google has some hardware up its sleeve for WebM (VP8) or Theora video decoding in future Android models. But even if it does, any current Android owner will be left out in the cold. But I guess Android users should be used to getting no support from Google and the carriers, anyway.

So what could the rationale possibly be for this move? Are they just trying to spite Apple? Trying to push people back towards Flash video, in some vain attempt to force Apple’s hand with Flash support? Seems desperate and, well, stupid to me. If they’re trying to force people to use WebM, this is a pretty stupid way to go about that, too. Web designers are already having enough trouble putting up videos for desktop vs. mobile; the last thing they want is to be creating separate files and special coding for different desktop browsers, plus different mobile devices. That’s IE/Netscape all over again, and it’s exactly what HTML5 is trying to resolve.

If anything, this move will only marginalize Chrome at a time when its support is really just getting started. It’s the sort of thing Microsoft did once its browser became completely dominant. Once everyone is using your product, change the way it functions so that all web designers need to cater to your browser only.

The problem is, Chrome is far from the dominant browser. People have other options—lots of them, in fact. So when they get to a site with H.264 video, and it doesn’t work, they’ll just start using another browser.

I don’t see how Google wins this one.

Today is one of those magical days when an Apple rumor you thought you’d never hear the end of finally comes true. Like “Apple is making a phone” or “Macs are going to use Intel chips” or “The Beatles are coming to iTunes”, “Verizon will get the iPhone” has been around since about ten minutes after the original iPhone was announced.

These rumors are special, because they are the kinds of rumors that are obviously going to come true eventually, but they are completely unlikely to happen at the time of their origin. It’s like saying that someday, Apple will replace Steve Jobs as CEO. Well, sure, that HAS to happen eventually, unless Jobs really is an alien cyborg of some kind. But it’s not going to happen this year, or probably even for the next few years.

People play these rumors to death because they know that eventually they have to come true. And then they can claim they were right all along. They hope people will forget that they originally included an arrival date along with their prediction. Six months from now, by next June, sometime next year—the latest two were “just after Christmas” and “by Valentine’s Day.”

When you’re dealing in rumors that have to come true eventually, the date you attach to the rumor becomes the rumor itself, guys. So sorry, you’ve been wrong up until now. Well, the Valentine’s Day people are technically correct, but they were hedging a bit.

The only people who can kill such rumors are the people at Apple. And they can only kill them by making them come true. So today, we get to see the Verizon iPhone rumor die, once and for all. I wonder what ironclad rumor will replace it? That Apple will stop making Macs, perhaps?

(On a side note: Can you imagine if Verizon DIDN’T announce an iPhone today? They call a post-CES conference, let the speculation come to a boil, and then announce some new Android phone instead? Heck, they could announce world peace at this point, and people would be disappointed for months.)