Remember how, earlier this month, mobile development company Ansca Mobile accused its partner PapayaMobile of ripping off parts of its SDK for use in Papaya’s Social Game Engine? Well, it seems things are still tense between the two companies, even though they are keeping their business partnership in place for now. PapayaMobile is chalking up the whole situation to a “miscommunication,” and wants to move on to talk about other news. But when pressed for details, the company won’t go on the record with anything more than a canned statement regarding their actions.
Ansca Mobile COO David Rangel, who originally brought the issue to our attention, says the situation is resolved, but also declined to provide additional public comment.
For background, the situation that occurred involved PapayaMobile using what Rangel called a “blatant copy” of some aspects of Ansca’s own Corona SDK within its gaming engine. The engine included some of PapayaMobile’s syntax and sample code, and the company even used Ansca’s graphics to promote it on their company website.
The situation doesn’t appear to be malicious in nature, though – because, after all, if you’re going to try to be sneaky about things, you don’t post an image that actually includes the Ansca Mobile logo right there on your homepage. But it did seem odd, especially since the details of how this happened were never explained.
In addition, Ansca’s assets remained available in Papaya’s download for some time after the graphic was removed from the website, instead of being immediately taken done. They are, however, gone now.
Meanwhile, PapayaMobile’s only comment on the situation is that everything has been resolved. The company even takes somewhat of hurt tone, as if they were the victim here:
We have carried out our investigation of the allegations made by Ansca reported by TechCrunch on February 3rd. We wish that our partner would have come to us directly about this issue considering we are business partners. However, all material that was in question has been removed and we now consider the situation resolved between the two companies.
What’s lacking here is an apology, which is interesting. It even begs the question as to whether Papaya thinks they had the right to do what they did, which, considering Ansca’s response to the situation, seems to be the wrong opinion.
Papaya declined to comment any further when we reached out with additional questions. The company says it believes to have removed the assets in question, and is doing due diligence to make sure that’s the case.
The situation, miscommunication or not, appears to be now resolved, and the two companies are remaining partners, at least for the time being.