Mac App Store: What’s in a name?

Mac App Store: What’s in a name?

May 16 2026

Checking the Mac App Store charts for my own apps, I happened to notice an oddly-named app in the top ten list of Safari extensions in the United States: App for YouTube ℠.

Who names their app App? That’s absurdly generic, like naming your child Child. Or Jeff Johnson. Also curious is the service mark symbol in the app name. The App Store allows developers to use a third-party trademark in an app name (see my own Homecoming for Mastodon) as long as the trademark appears at the end of the app name, in a phrase such as “for [trademark]” indicating the purpose of the app. However, the App Store does not require or encourage the use of a trademark symbol such as ℠ or ™ in app names. My Spidey Sense™ started tingling, so I decided to search the Mac App Store. The results were interesting.

Among others, there’s App for YouTube, no suffix, App for YouTube ®, App for Youtube!, App for YouTube! », because an exclamation point was apparently not enough, App For YouTube ¡, for the Spanish speakers, App for YouTube •, and App For YouTube ., period. So now we have an explanation for the service mark! For good measure, there’s also App for Youtube - AI YT Studio, because everything nowadays needs AI, as well as Streaming for YouTube ® and YTMate: App for YT Studio that both show “App for YouTube” in their first screenshot.

Several of these apps have a link to a privacy policy web page that’s hosted on a generic free site such as sites.google.com, docs.google.com, github.io, wixsite.com, or vercel.app, which is always a bad sign. A couple of the apps use URL shorteners for the privacy policy link: bit.ly and shorturl.at. Why is that even allowed?!? And some of the privacy policy links are broken, returning HTTP 404 Not Found. Does Apple App Store review even look at the privacy policies?

By the way, it turns out that the app name suffixes in the App Store are not necessarily included in the .app names on disk when installed on your Mac. If there are duplicate app names, then the App Store installs the apps in separate subfolders of your Applications folder.

If you’re wondering how this is compatible with the default case-insensitive file system of the Mac, what you see in Finder are only display names, not the actual directory names.

I don’t know whether this surfeit of YouTube apps was the product of multiple developers acting independently or one developer hiding behind multiple Apple accounts, an App Store scam that I’ve seen before. I’ve never heard of any of these developers, and I doubt that you have either, not even AdBlocker LLC, the developer of App for YouTube ℠, who is not to be confused with Adblock Inc, the developer of AdBlock, who is to be confused with Eyeo GmbH, the developer of Adblock Plus, who acquired Adblock Inc in 2021. Got that? In any case, many duplicate app names with random symbols at the end is clearly a perverse experience for App Store users, and Apple’s so-called curation is primarily to blame. Moreover, almost all of these apps have pricey subscriptions, another App Store red flag that I’ve discussed before.