Only problem is, that's about as generic an icon as you could get by mixing Apple's default iOS icon style with a standard WiFi and Sync icon. Not that unique...
I'm pretty sure that wasn't the "standard" WiFi icon until it showed up in OS X. I think the original "standard" WiFi icon was either this one or the one that looks like a person with radio waves coming out of their head: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wifi_logo.jpg
There was no international standard wireless Internet logo for a long, long time. There still may not be. But this one is indeed Apple’s standard AirPort icon (they dropped one ring going OS X → iOS due to size contraints).
I dunno, the headline is "Apple copies rejected app" not "Apple copies rejected app icon".
Seems to me that people either don't know how the App Store and its requirements work, or they're just want to be outraged at Apple.
Edit: It seems to me that even people commenting here in HN don't realise that the App Store guidelines don't allow for an app to take this kind of access.
The icons are similar (despite how shitty an icon it is), but it won't actually be used anywhere other than apple.com/iOS5 as far as I know; for example it's not even in the Settings app on iOS 5.
Plus people are forgetting that this icon is just what Apple have used for years as their WiFi/AirPort.
If anything, the developer copied — or at the very least, took a lot of inspiration from — Apple's icons for his app's icon.
Oh yeah, I should probably be clear that I personally don't think the icon is a big deal, for the reasons you stated.
I actually don't think anything about it is a big deal. Someone made an app that should have been an OS feature, Apple rejected it for using undocumented APIs, Apple builds the thing that should have been an OS feature, and Apple haters use this sequence of events as evidence that Apple is Evil.
It's basically the same thing as when people enabled multitasking on jailbroken iPhones and then Apple implemented it. Did they "steal" the idea of multitasking?
Copied from another HN comment, but if this is true it'd explain why there's so much furor about it on the boards:
> yardie 36 minutes ago | link
> From what I remember it used the published APIs which Apple then unpublished and rejected his app. This is why the story got so much traction in the first place. If it was another developer doing cool things with unpublished APIs it would have been sold through one of the other appstores and that would have been the end of it.
