--- title: Four months after I shipped SnackCheckApp.com author: Giacomo Balli published: 2026-06-23 url: https://BigBalli.com/blog/four-months-after-i-shipped-snackcheckappcom tags: iOS, Product, Growth, Data, Reading --- # Four months after I shipped SnackCheckApp.com *By Giacomo Balli* | *Published: June 23, 2026* Four months after I shipped SnackCheckApp.com, a stranger filed my app's name as an EU trademark. Same name, same three classes my app operates in. I found out "by accident". The accident was an email from a European trademark attorney. It opened "Hi [a name that isn't mine]," which is how I knew something was off. He was writing to tell the applicant that his EU filing had a deficiency and he could fix it for €100. My first instinct was that it was a scam, so I went and checked. His registration number is real and current in the official register. The deadline he described is real and sitting on the file. The €100 is honestly cheap for the work. He mines the public application database for filings that need help, and he'd gone looking for a contact address, found the only live product with that name, and emailed me instead of the person he meant to reach. So the lawyer was legitimate. That's the part I keep turning over, because it means nothing that happened here required anyone to break a law. Every EU trademark application is published in a public database the day it's filed. Your App Store listing is public. Filing costs €850, and nobody at the office checks whether the name already belongs to a product that's been shipping for months. If nobody objects within three months of publication, it's theirs across the EU. Then it's an IP complaint against your listing, or a polite offer to sell you your own name. I don't know the applicant's intent and I'm not going to pretend I do. What I know is how easy the system makes it. The thing I actually took from this is smaller and more annoying. We spend our whole attention on the idea and the build and the launch, because that's what the job feels like from the inside. Meanwhile there's an entire economy sitting downstream of our work, quietly making money off the fact that we're too busy building to look up. Database miners, name filers, cloners, fake DMCA, review farms. Most of it operates legally. You spend a year making a thing exist, and someone spends an afternoon making it theirs. Then I ran the same search on myself properly. Nobody owns my app's name in the United States, where my entire business actually is. Not a squatter. Not me either. Search your app name on tmview . org and on tmsearch . uspto . gov. It takes two minutes and it's free. I'd rather you find out on a Tuesday afternoon than from an email meant for somebody else. [Discuss on LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7491487614567522304) --- **Tags:** iOS, Product, Growth, Data, Reading --- *View the [HTML version](https://BigBalli.com/blog/four-months-after-i-shipped-snackcheckappcom) of this post.*