Figma Disables AI App Design Tool After It Copied Apple’s Weather App
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... OK?
Most people would design a very similar app if asked to design a weather app. Due diligence would be looking at existing apps in the space and making a decision on how much you want to deviate from the norm.
I once had to make an EPG for a TV app. EPGs are the channel schedules on any cable box interface.
It was stupidly complicated getting the navigation down solid. Took a long time. My boss asked at the end "this is great. Can we patent anything from it?"
Uh, no. Anyone with the same problem (navigating multiple channel schedules at once via arrow keys) is going to come up with something similar.
Same with weather apps. And Apple even has guidelines on app layouts for scrolling vs drilling down nested pages.
Seems like the AI did exactly what a human would do.
Patenting obvious solutions is done all the time and perfectly fine from a legal point of view.
Yeah, I don’t know about that. Enterprise stuff they do with team, fig jam, and dev mode is pretty shady. They bate businesses with “free” features for a year, you can’t opt out of them, employees adopt them, then Figma starts charging once they’ve got their claws into you.
Figma’s enterprise tactics are some of the shadiest things I’ve ever seen from a vendor that I pay.
But, they have silly stickers in Fig Jam, so people like them.
I mean, they were totally OK with selling their whole company to Adobe. That's a pretty asshole move...
Building off the other reply - it’s the standard UX/UI design tool these days. Name a popular SaaS tool - their design / product team likely uses Figma.
They were recently in the news after their acquisition by Adobe fell through.
They also recently release a competitor to Google slides/powerpoint.
It’s a UI design tool. It’s what UI and UX designers use to create mockups that are then given to frontend programmers to implement.
“Within hours of seeing this tweet, we identified the issue, which was related to the underlying design systems that were created. Ultimately it is my fault for not insisting on a better QA process for this work and pushing our team hard to hit a deadline for Config,” Figma CEO Dylan Field said on Twitter. Config is Figma’s annual conference where it showcased Make Design. “I have asked our team to temporarily disable the Make Design feature until we are confident we can stand behind its output. The feature will be disabled when our US based team wakes up in a few hours, and we will re-enable it when we have completed a full QA pass on the underlying design system.”
That’s one way to put this shocking tidbit.