Sora copycats flooded Apple’s App Store, and there are still some | TechCrunch

Sora’s rapid adoption prompted a number of App Store scammers to try to take action. Following last week’s launch of OpenAI’s invite-only video-generating mobile app, Apple’s App Store was flooded with fakes also billing themselves as “Sora” or “Sora 2” – the latter a reference to the underlying new AI video model released alongside the mobile app.

These apps somehow made it past Apple’s App Review process. They even had public listings on the App Store, despite using a brand name that was trademarked by OpenAI and was quite well known in the tech industry even before the app’s debut.

According to research provided to TechCrunch by the app intelligence platform at our request App figuresthere were more than a dozen apps from the “Sora” brand that went live on the App Store after the launch of the official app. More than half of them specifically used ‘Sora 2’ in their name. (One of which were noticed by Apple blogger and expert John Gruber, who called it the “App Store Scam of the Week.”)

Many of the apps weren’t newcomers either. Some had been live in the App Store since earlier this year or even last year, sometimes under different names. The imposters, which also include those live on Google Play, had seen around 300,000 collective installs to date, with more than 80,000 coming in after the official launch of Sora’s app. (OpenAI has since announced that Sora’s official mobile app has been downloaded 1 million times, for comparison.)

Nearly all of the imposters had updated shortly after the launch of OpenAI’s Sora app to take advantage of consumer demand and searches, often by changing their names.

It’s unclear how these apps managed to slip past Apple’s reviewers; Apple ultimately pulled many of them from the App Store, according to Appfigurs.

Of the rogue apps, the largest was called ‘Sora 2 – AI Video Generator’ – an obvious attempt to game App Store searches on the keyword ‘sora’. After the launch of the official app, there were more than 50,000 installations.

At the time of writing, some Sora-branded apps are still active, despite the potential for consumer confusion. However, one of them, ‘PetReels – Sora for Pets’, has only seen a few hundred installations. Another, “Viral AI Photo Maker: Vi-sora,” tries to put the word Sora in, but hasn’t gained traction either.

The app that uses the branding “Sora 2” in its name does slightly better (Sora 2 – Video Generator Ai). It has racked up north of 6,000 downloads and counting.

Collectively, the apps earned more than $160,000 – quite a bit of money considering their short lifespan.

Apple was asked for comment on how Sora-branded apps could go live and whether these remaining Sora-branded apps would be removed. It did not respond before publication.