You've all played Plants Vs. Zombie, right? Sorry, what? Some of you haven't? Well isn't this awkward. Right, off to the App Store with you. Hurry along.
Now, if I'd asked you to do that a week ago, there's a chance you might have come upon exactly the game I deliberately misspelled above. Popcap's iPhone favourite is, of course, "Plants Vs. Zombies", but in the heat of consumerist excitement, who's to say you wouldn't have downloaded "Plants Vs. Zombie", a deliberate misspelling by its maker (not Popcap, you will have gathered) with the sole intention of conning you out of your cash with a scam product.
A product, moreover, which Apple itself approved for sale in its store, before it was pulled at the end of last week alongside a bunch of other dodgy knock-offs.
The problem is, this is far from the only example in what's becoming a worrying trend, frustrating not only the developers whose games are being ripped off, but also the customers fooled into buying them.
Temple Jump, a game from the same fly-by-night chancer that made Plants Vs. Zombie, nakedly aped Imangi's superlative Temple Run, in a ruse that proved – briefly – so wildly successful, it leaped into the upper echelons of the Top Grossing chart.
The mood of developers was summed up by Matt Mills, co-founder of Whale Trail developer ustwo, who tweeted that it was a "f*cking disgrace". Apple pulled Temple Jump in last Friday's cull, but plenty more remain.
To be fair to Apple, the issue is not always clear cut. Copycat games have been around as long as gaming itself, because new ideas are inherently risky so businesses recycle others' best ones in the hope of repeating their success. But there are different degrees of shamelessness. And the broader, bigger issue for Apple is one of trust.
Before the App Store, buying and downloading content on mobile devices was a hateful, nightmarish purgatory that bemused and angered in equal measure those who bothered to try it, holding back an entire market in the process.
Apple's genius lay in making it all a magnificently slick doddle – simple and secure. You knew where you were, what you were doing and, to all intents and purposes, what you were getting. It's no accident that an astonishing 10 billion items were downloaded from the App Store in its first two and a half years.
Games were always at the heart of this - nine out of the ten best-selling iPhone apps ever in the US (as of Jan 2011) were games. This put the willies up Nintendo and Sony, who saw Apple become a massive player in the gaming sector without really trying.
Instead it created the platform, devices and delivery mechanism and left game developers to do the rest. But this hands-off approach is now threatening to backfire, with a steadily growing perception that the biggest control freak of them all has taken its eye off the ball – and its customers are paying the price.
Apple's role, needless to say, is not to judge whether a game is any good or not. That's what the rating system is for, with rubbish apps in theory receiving the average score they deserve. And scam apps like Plants Vs. Zombie and Temple Jump were duly savaged by reviewers, but not before they had been downloaded in big numbers.
It is to Apple's credit, it must be stressed, that it took appropriate action to remove them. But a system that allows these to be officially approved in the first place, I would humbly suggest, is not fit for purpose. Can you imagine "Super Mario Brother" turning up on Nintendo's online store? "Gods of War" on PSN, perhaps? Me neither.
Part of the problem is the insane volume of content Apple has to wade through, approve and publish on a daily basis – several orders of magnitude greater than anything console makers have to worry about. But, to be blunt, that's not our problem.
Apple loyalists embrace the company's closed, protectionist approach to its platforms, because it results in a better user experience. Android's app store, by contrast, is riddled with all manner of unchecked nonsense as a result of Google's open platform philosophy.
The App Store is supposed to be different. That's what you pay for. You know, "it just works". And now we have to be wary of scam products in a shop over which Apple wields total control? No-one signed up for that.
The message that it's open season for the Del Boys of development cannot be allowed to stick and Apple must surely realise this – after all, the company has sold hundreds of millions of gadgets and earned the custom, love and loyalty of millions who believe in the brand.
Speaking to app developers over the past week, it seems that a good place for Apple to start would be in improving the lines of communication with its content creators. Calls for an easy way to red-flag perceived copyright infringement, for instance, seem entirely sensible.
Either way, the "wild west" – as one prominent industry figure described the App Store to me – needs taming, in perception and reality.
Because when you bite into this Apple, the last thing you should expect to find is that pieces of it, however tiny, are rotten.
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