Use an existing App as a Model?

So I am growing a community (a.k.a. followers) around beekeeping for a future product (https://www.hyperhyve.com) and I decided to launch an App early, which I originally wanted to launch with the product (think IOT Beehive w/ sensors). Due to the large capital needs to get the hive product to market, I made the decision to design and release a beekeepers app for keeping track of their hives. There are several on the market, but only one that appears to be smashing it with a good UX and much larger market reach than the others. In fact, I have used it to manage my personal hives for a couple of years now and to see what I liked and what I thought could be added or done better.

Due to the success of this one app, I made the decision to mimic many aspects of the app with the Hyper Hyve spin, as well as change up some of the flow. This obviously saves me a bunch of time in market research, and poor aspects of the product, however, I question how often this happens and whether I should not be using an existing app as a model to model my initial app. V2 and beyond will be a bit different as the hives will data push to the app instead of relying on user input for everything.