It 's clear that Arunkumar took code from my open source project Anticipate for his closed sourc...

[G+_Michael Conlon]

Originally shared by Daniel Ciao

 

It's clear that Arunkumar took code from my open source project Anticipate for his closed source project Chromer. The changelog for the latest version looked suspiciously similar to the work I've done for Anticipate - improving setting the default app, dynamic toolbar color, pre-fetch using an accessibility service, etc etc, so I started to investigate. The decompiled code matches up with mine.

 

He accused me of stealing his idea when I published Anticipate, and I'll admit, I'm not much of an ideas guy. That's why I often contribute to projects like Aidan Follestad's. However, I did see a project which could be improved, and put my own spin on it.  I came up with my own idea on how to implement it with an accessibility service that pre-loads links, built the app entirely from the ground up, and open-sourced it so others can improve on it. I don't mind people taking my code & learning from them - however, the license on my project is GPLv3, which means anyone who does so must open source their projects as well. It's this kind of behavior by Arun that discourages me and others from open sourcing our works & decreases our motivation in developing apps. I hope Arun will correct his actions by open sourcing his work & giving proper credit.

 

The album is some of the technical evidence (I explain them in the captions) - you can decompile the APK using dex2jar and use jd-gui to see all the copied code as well. Anticipate's source code is here - https://github.com/plusCubed/anticipate.

 

I don't particularly care that he copied specifically the following code - I just chose some of the more obvious examples. While Arun copied and moved some code around, and changed them as he needed to fit his app, the architecture and techniques are identical.

 

Why did I spend all of that time writing this? I would much rather be doing something else - heck, this code isn't even all that precious, complicated, or significant anyway in both of these extremely simple apps compared to my other projects. Arun clearly has the technical talent as well. I want to expose this because it is wrong - making your app closed source, and stealing other's open source work, licensed with the terms that anyone who uses the code will open source their app, is wrong, no matter how insignificant. As I wrote above, I sincerely hope that, Arun, you can correct your mistakes by open sourcing your app & giving credit.

 

Closing this, I would like to say that the only purpose of this post is for Arun to review his mistakes. The users will still keep using Chromer regardless - most users don't care about the app's origin as long as the app is usable. Chromer started with a great idea, inspiring mine, and just became too greedy.

[G+_Brandon Giesing / CosiC]

This is a false rumor. Actually, it was the opposite. Anticipate cracked open Chromer and released the code then made false claims that Chromer was the one that did it.