“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft

Viral success (for someone else)

VoltekPlay writes on Reddit that it was only alerted to the existence of My Baby or Not! on iOS by “a suspicious burst of traffic on our itch.io page—all coming from Google organic search.” Only after adding a “where did you find our game?” player poll to the page were the developers made aware of some popular TikTok videos featuring the iOS version.

“Luckily, some people in the [TikTok] comments mentioned the real game name—Diapers, Please!—so a few thousand players were able to google their way to our page,” VoltekPlay writes. “I can only imagine how many more ended up on the thief’s App Store page instead.”

Earlier this week, the $2.99 iOS release of My Baby or Not! was quickly climbing iOS’s paid games charts, attracting an estimated 20,000 downloads overall, according to Sensor Tower.

The App Store listing credited My Baby or Not! to “Marwane Benyssef,” a new iOS developer with no apparent history in the game development community. Benyssef’s only other iOS game, Kiosk Food Night Shift, was released last August and appears to be a direct copy of Kiosk, a pay-what-you-want title that was posted to itch.io last year (with a subsequent “full” release on Steam this year).

In a Reddit post, the team at VoltekPlay said that they had filed a DMCA copyright claim against My Baby or Not!. Apple subsequently shared that claim with Benyssef, VoltekPlay writes, along with a message that “Apple encourages the parties to a dispute to work directly with one another to resolve the claim.”

This morning, Ars reached out to Apple to request a comment on the situation. While awaiting a response (which Apple has yet to provide), Apple appears to have removed Benyssef’s developer page and all traces of their games from the iOS App Store.