I’ve forked an old Pebble watch face project with hopes of breathing new life into it. I created a pull request for my changes but I’ve not heard anything in around a month. I fear it is abandoned like so many other older Pebble watch faces and apps. So, I’m preparing to take over the source code, still open source. My question is, now that it is ready to be listed in the store, I think it should have a new UUID so as to not be confused with the original. Or am I incorrect as to how that works for the App Store? I’ve bumped the version and will be changing the author but will include an attribution to the originator. Without his work, it wouldn’t have been made.
There are actually two UUIDs associated with each app. There’s the app UUID and app ID used for the Pebble appstore. iirc you can’t upload a new app that users either IDs.
We had an internal discussion about this recently. One of the ideas was to show forks on the Pebble App Store (in this case, you could link your new app to the old app as a fork. People who browse to the App Store page for the old app could see that you’ve got a more recent fork going).
In light of Eric’s information, I’d suggest a new App ID, a new App UUID, and an updated App title. That way, should the original developer wish to continue, they might be able to release updates for their original apps and the forked app could survive by itself.
Eric’s message seems to be phrased a little oddly — devs have no control over the appstree ID, only the app UUID. That’s the only one that can and needs to be changed before publishing the new version.
I believe Eric is recommending to add it as a new app or watch face, which will create a new app id. That makes sense. It becomes its own entity and maintained separately from the original. In my case, that’s exactly what it is.
Yes, and I’m saying that calling that out specifically is a little odd since as far as I know there’s not a way to do it otherwise. My understanding is that you need to prove ownership of an app before pushing updates to it if you go through the claiming process. But maybe I’m wrong about that
In my case, it’s a fork of the original. So, in that case, it is a new app/watch face. The repository is not the same as the original. So proving “ownership” isn’t an issue, as far as I see. But derivative works should always reference the original, IMO. Which I will be doing.
