one of my crew made the app!

[DM_Benjamin]

Great work on the app, I am glad one is out there now.

I do worry about the legality of it all as you didn't co-ordinate with the devs or at least Bishop

[chalsdk]

Lets gets things Right..

NOTHING in life is FREE!

We NEEDED the app for over a year now, and peaple have been *****ing about it!

And it shoud bring extra peaple to the Game, so the "Utopia Lords" risk nothing, as utopia is always borderline unplayerble on a phone in the first place!

They where NEVER going to fund money into making it, they made that perfektly clear!

If anything they shoud by happy! It will bring extra players!

However I agree that perhaps he shoud have talked with bishop and others first..But it might be able to save a fastly dying game, as soo many talked about!

If it shoud be free & live of donation can be argued.. In essens I agree with both stances. but perhaps donation had been better

[LoRD_SaMPuaN]

Should have run it by the developers before even publishing it, let alone charging for it. You're prolly in breach of some copyrights.

Ah well, we'll see soon enough when Bishop sees this thread. My guess is that he'll ask you to remove it from the store or make it free.

id be seriously disappointed at bishop & devs if they would take that route.. thats been the ONLY thing whole community agrees on that we need a mobile app & the cost of developing the app was constantly brought up as an answer to the request.. if anything, this guy should be shown gratitude and put all possible effort to get this app running to full extent with all utilities possible..

p.s. as for him charging money for it, i believe the cost was told to be like 50k$ or something? this guy asks for 2$ per user and thats 10k$ if we had 5k players and all were using it.. i dont see why would devs be grumpy about it, for getting something ppl ask for done without their effort nor money..

[Malficient]

Hahaha typical Uto community, ***** about not having an app then *****es about having to pay 2 dollars for one that someone spent a year on creating in his own spare time for you guys. Great work hogs!! Glad to be part of the kingdom that helped you finish it off. Pretty cool to be part of the war that's featured in the screen shots too. But it will never be any good until it's in iOS format.

[texn]

Hahaha typical Uto community, ***** about not having an app then *****es about having to pay 2 dollars for one that someone spent a year on creating in his own spare time for you guys. Great work hogs!! Glad to be part of the kingdom that helped you finish it off. Pretty cool to be part of the war that's featured in the screen shots too. But it will never be any good until it's in iOS format.

No one is really complaining about that he wants a few bucks for it. It's more of a concern if the creators of Utopia will go viking mode on him since he might charge for an IP that isnt his. Thats the problem.
Anyways nice work! And i hope everything will go fine!

[TheOne]

good job :P

and $1.99 is totally reasonable.

[Korp]

The thought is nice and a proper app is needed but its not that hard having a discussion with Bishop about all this so it could been done the proper way.

Myself I am aversed to pay for anything that I havent exactly tried our know from the begining its solid. So donations would been right step to take, just look at munk he seems to strive with the donations so far. :)

[protector]

Hahaha typical Uto community, ***** about not having an app then *****es about having to pay 2 dollars for one that someone spent a year on creating in his own spare time for you guys. Great work hogs!! Glad to be part of the kingdom that helped you finish it off. Pretty cool to be part of the war that's featured in the screen shots too. But it will never be any good until it's in iOS format.

It's not so much an issue with 2 dollars, it's an issue with possibly copyright violations.
Communicating this with Bishop or the dev's before publishing it would've been a better way.

[joshmg]

I'm happy to have a conversation with the Utopia-devs if they're interested! It'd be cool to talk with them, actually. Like I said, I've played this game on and off since I was a kid, and the point of this app isn't to scrape money from the Utopia community. If the Utopia-devs don't like the situation of the app (which at the moment, is pure speculation of a few, and not evidenced by anything), then I'm absolutely willing to have a conversation with them, and do what's best for the community.

I'm disappointed that the community's initial response is borderline hostile. I'm surprised that you few chose copyright as your primary concern, instead of letting that kind of stuff be handled by the parties whose concern it actually is (Utopia's Dev's and mine). Regarding my perspective on copyright, the app integrates with utopia similarly to how uMunk does, and they've not taken issue with that, so I don't think there's an issue. Furthermore, the Utopia-devs have had discussions about apps interfacing with utopia on these very forums, and have not expressed any discontent with the concept. I also saw (nor see currently) anything in their rules^1 that forbids any actions that the app performs. Finally, and most importantly, their decisions are their own, and Utopia is theirs; I'm happy to comply with their needs. In my mind, I owe them respect and gratitude for maintaining a game for over 10 years; I do not wish to disrespect of subvert their wishes.

You're welcome to use the app, and you're also welcome to pretend it doesn't exist. I was hoping to do some good for you guys.

^1 - wiki.utopia-game.com/index.php?title=Game_Rules

[Zauper]

josh:

Thanks for making the app. I'm sure android users will be happy. While it's not quite designed the way I would have done it, it does look both nice and useful.

I suspect, generally, you won't really run afoul of legal issues (well, maybe copyright but I suspect utopia can't be copyrighted). What you're doing, as I understand it, is just building a web browser with links that take people to specific places and change the way information is displayed to be more mobile friendly. There are plenty of (kosher) examples of that happening historically. That said, I think that the community generally prefers free services that they donate for over paid services -- particularly given the beta nature.

You're right though, the way it works is very similar to how stinger or munk work -- those two operate as web extensions that scrape data off the page for use outside of utopia (and to some extent, munk, utools, etc will also reformat the way the page is displayed, add links, etc) -- what you are doing is the same kind of scraping and reformatting of the page.

All that said, this is something I'll never use both because I use an iOS phone and because it doesn't appear to integrate with munk.

[joshmg]

Thanks, Zauper.

Regarding uMunk integration: it does! Here's my reply to a similar question posted on reddit.

"If you enter your uMunk credentials within the "uMunk Sync" tab, then it enables uMunk syncing on every operation that you do within the app automatically. It also sends your province data as you access it (so, if you don't go into your Buildings-Tab, it won't send your survey). Everything is done behind the scenes without you doing anything other than entering your credentials. You can disable it by hitting the "Clear" button within the uMunk sync."

--

Also, if the android app does catch on, I'd be interested in making an iOS version. But that would also take a long time, but would be fun. I make iOS apps for a living, so it wouldn't be terribly hard to port it over. I know my KD mates are hounding me for one, haha. Just trying to figure out how to clone myself so I'd have enough time.

[Osaze]

The issue isn't that he made the app, the issue is that he made it without the permissions of the owners of the copyright. Honestly he just needs permission from them and he is fine.

[Zauper]

The issue isn't that he made the app, the issue is that he made it without the permissions of the owners of the copyright. Honestly he just needs permission from them and he is fine.

Is it copyrighted? I don't see a (c) anywhere which would normally indicate the presence of a copyright.

You certainly can't copyright the word 'utopia', so what would the copyright be for?

All that said, of course it would generally be recommended to get permission from the owners of the game before you build an app that generates revenue off of it, but again, think about angel. It's not like Brother Green had permission from mehul to build an application, he just did it and then put ads in it to get revenue for himself. I'm sure that if B&S don't like it, there are things they can do that make it hard/impossible for his app to function, but that doesn't make it illegal.

Josh -- does it also pull in the ability to do things like umunk autofill?

[joshmg]

Thanks, Zauper. To answer your question: I don't know. I don't think so. I'm not sure what uMunk's autofill is, so there's a really good chance that it doesn't do it. ;) It just uploads intel, it doesn't download anything from outside the app--I didn't want to go into that realm of capability, because I think it starts to walk the line of giving an unfair advantage to users with the app vs those without.

[Swagger]

When was the last time a dev posted in here anyways?