Temple Run Android clone may be the most brazen copycat to date

Update: The official Temple Run for Android will be out on March 27th.

It's unfortunate that app clones and copycats are becoming an increasingly common occurrence in the smartphone gaming space, but this latest knock-off is perhaps the worst yet.

We've been waiting for the wonderful Temple Run to appear on Android devices since mid-January - indeed, we've been told it will be released sometime this month.

Over the weekend, the game did, in fact, appear in the Android Market. It wasn't the real deal, though, despite the fact that it had the same name, logo, and developer details as the genuine version.

Rather than featuring the real Temple Run game, this app simply showed a countdown timer, with notification ads all over the place. A really nasty piece of work.

While "Temple Run by Imangi Studios" has now been taken down, it attracted over 23,000 downloads in the time it was available.

The fact that the game was published on the Android Market with not only the right name but also the actual development studio's name really makes us wonder whether Google should be policing its digital store a little better.