A pirated iOS port of Blue Prince fooled people into paying $10

Apple’s App Store review yet again let at least one unofficial mobile port of a hot new game slip through – this time, for Blue Prince. But shortly after we published this article, the port that we found disappeared from the App Store.

In a joint post on Monday, Blue Prince’s developer, Dogubomb, and its publisher, Raw Fury, said that they have “received reports of games claiming to be Blue Prince on iOS.” Currently, the game is only available on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.

Before it was removed, I easily found one iOS copy of the game just by searching Blue Prince on the App Store – it was the first search result. The icon looked like it would be the icon for a hypothetical mobile version of the game, the listing had screenshots that looked like they were indeed from Blue Prince, and the description for the game matched the description on Steam.

But on the iOS clone’s listing, the game’s seller was listed as “Samet Altinay,” and I can’t find any connection between this person and Blue Prince outside of this app. The copyright was also attributed to “DogBomb” — notice the missing “u.”

I purchased the now-removed, unofficial version of Blue Prince, which cost $9.99, and installed it on my iPhone 16 Pro to test it out. In a few minutes of playing, it appeared to be a barely modified version of the actual Blue Prince game, though with a few tweaks to make it better-suited for mobile, like a virtual joystick. I also quickly ran into a major bug: when I tried to walk through one of the doors from the Entrance Hall, I fell through the floor.

Apple didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. Before the listing was pulled, the unofficial mobile port was the #8 paid app in the Entertainment category on iOS. When I published the article, it only had one three-star review, with the writer saying they also hit a bug that caused them to fall through the floor.

If you, like me, bought this clone version of the game, you might want to try to get a refund. Apple has a support document about how to request a refund on its website.

Dogubomb and Raw Fury have not officially announced an iOS port of Blue Prince. “We have no news about other platforms at this time, but if that changes we will make an official announcement,” they said in their post. “While we investigate we would kindly ask that you do not purchase or download these apps.”

Apple has previously allowed copycats of games like Wordle and Palworld to appear on the App Store.

Update, April 28th: The Blue Prince iOS clone we found was removed from the App Store.