Type a sweet into either app store and you will get dozens of results whose names differ by a word. This is not usually deception. It is what happens when app discovery runs on search terms and every studio in a genre is optimising for the same handful of nouns.
Three reasons names collide
- Search is the shopfront. Most installs in this genre come from someone typing a word into a store, so the word goes into the title. Generic words cannot be trademarked in any useful way, so everybody uses them.
- Sequels keep the name. A studio with a successful puzzle publishes the follow-up under the same brand with a number or a second noun attached, which is entirely legitimate and doubles the apparent duplication.
- Successful mechanics get copied. Within months of a hit, similar games appear from other teams. Provided nobody copies art, characters or trademarked names, this is legal and normal — the same thing happened with every genre that ever worked.
How to see which one you have found
- Look at the developer name, not the title. It is directly under the app name on both stores and is the only reliable identifier.
- Tap the developer to see their other apps. A studio with a coherent catalogue of puzzles is a different proposition from an account with forty unrelated titles published in a month.
- Check the release and update dates. An original and its imitator are rarely the same age.
- Read three recent reviews. Players are quick to say when a game is not the one they thought they were installing.
When it stops being fine
Copying a genre is normal. Copying a specific game's artwork, characters, icon or exact name is not, and both stores remove apps for it when a rights holder complains. If an app's icon looks like a famous game's icon at thumbnail size, that is the case worth being suspicious of — and worth reporting through the store rather than installing.
What this site does about it
Every game covered here links to its official store listing, and the write-up names the game exactly as the store does. If two of the four on this page come from the same developer and two do not, that is stated rather than glossed over. Beyond that, similar names are not in themselves a reason to distrust a game — a good puzzle with a boring name is still a good puzzle.