I think you're being rather flippant here. Cloned would seem to imply that they did the work to re-craft it. This is just stealing. Hell they're directing traffic to his servers.
To be more precise, it's clear copyright infringement. Except that it's happening in China so we can do nothing about it.
- They couldn't have just stolen it. There are slight differences in the UI plus the binary has creator information embedded in it. The app is simple enough. I think it would be harder to take the source binary and modify it than to clone it.
- I'm not sure whether he maintains servers or not. If he did then he can do something about it. All I know is that he gets app usage information from pirated copies. Those pirated copies would be stolen but they would also not be obtained from the app store. There are two things happening: devs ripping off his ideas, users pirating his app
Sadly no. Luckily I have the trademark on the name TextPics so I have these apps using my name removed every now and then, however the process is very slow and manual thanks purely to Apples horrid process. With a clone on android google took care of it promptly and placed the word TextPics in a database of trademarks to avoid future violations.
But then there is the non-illegal clones that stole my content, design, icon, etc. Now they call themselves things like Text Pictures. Is this not wrong? Funny part is its maybe 90% Chinese. I think there may have been a few Russian ones.
To be more precise, it's clear copyright infringement. Except that it's happening in China so we can do nothing about it.