DMCA the ones using your text?

Can you build a moat on someone else's property?

It's not clear to me what you'd want the moat to be. It can't be the idea, because you don't hold ownership over the concept of checking USB device speed. The marketing copy is pretty clearly something you could DMCA but also it seems unlikely people are buying a USB connection tester because of the dev's origin story.

Personally I works at least submit a DCMA takedown of the plagiarizing.

Any idea where these copycat devs are from?

> The app became unexpectedly successful, hitting the top 100 paid utilities

What's your definition of "successful"? Mac App Store volume is quite low, especially with upfront paid apps. You're likely averaging only a few unit sales per day, right? Maybe only one unit per day, and even that might be a generous estimate.

> A few open-source clones have also appeared on GitHub

Is your app open source? If so, that's probably why you're getting copycats.

> It seems that derivative apps with plagiarized descriptions and app elements are being approved without issue. Does this signal a shift in App curation?

No. Apple's so-called "curation" has always been terrible.

> what is the moat? Is it brand, speed of innovation, marketing, or something else?

You could try and develop a brand and market it but I don’t think that would go well for something like this. Best case maybe you can game the rankings to stay number one but you’re probably up against professional app copiers.

So your moat is speed of innovation. Your basic app is copied. What new feature will enable you to stay ahead and drive sales? Or perhaps no feature can do that as the crowd grows so it’s on to the next app that doesn’t yet exist. What’s your new pain point?

when app store opened on ios i created a pomodoro app. I got some sort legal notice from creator of pomodoro technique ( some italian dude). I took my app down immediately.

> My app's value is its simplicity

With or without the advent LLMs, it's an uphill battle to build a moat around a small (but nice!) wrapper around the output of a command-line tool shipped with MacOS.

> what is the moat?

Increasingly, and sadly, it's online services with a monthly subscription and no data portability. Get users in with a generous free tier and pull up the drawbridge so they can't get out easily.

Clone it yourself 3 or 4 times. Rather than getting 1/6 of the traffic, you’ll get 5/10 of the traffic.

The best moat is you.

Study an audience for their pains and worldview and what they buy. Earn their trust through writing and freebies. Then they will want to buy because it's from you specifically.

I can recommend https://30x500.com/

There are two problems: 1. The Apple monopoly. They don’t have to care about indie devs because they own the market and are above the law. 2. Global marketplace. You can’t sue a nameless company in India for copyright infringement.

The end game for software moats is patents and proprietary data

Just report them for copyright infringement. Apple will take the blatant cases down. The copy-cats that don't infringe are just a side effect of success, so... congrats?

Regarding Reddit, it's a great place to find users but also copy-cats. Stick to posting "I built a thing that solves a problem" and avoid the bragging "I made $N in N days" indie-hacker style. The latter doesn't help the app anyways.

Moat: there isn't one for a utility someone can build in a few days. It can still be a good business - you seem to have marketing savvy which is a big part of it.

One suggestion, on your homepage - the "See USB Connection Information in Action" the screenshots are much too small. Nice looking app!

I built an iOS app that remotely connects to an android device and pushes an apk in a few days with claude code. I dont know anything about adb, iOS and Swift is alien to me.

So to answer your question, LLMs have lowered the bar substantially