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The Cold Hard Numbers About iPhone App Piracy

Posted July 29, 2009 3:00 PM by Tanner Godarzi
Categories: Podcasts Software 

imageWhen Apple released the iPhone SDK, it’s intentions were to protect developers by wrapping each App in it’s FairPlay DRM scheme which would crack down on piracy. However, it’s now easier than ever to download pirated Apps for free and one developer speaks out.

The developer of the game The Little Tank That Could reveals how much piracy has affected him.

“After the first release of my iPhone game ‘the little tank that could’, I was very excited. I thought the game was fun to play, and could possibly do very well on the appstore. That turned out not to be the case. For the first 5 days on the store, it sold 20, 10, 5, 2 and 8 copies. A total of 45 copies sold. That was disheartening. To my astonishment, I found out that ‘the little tank that could’, which sold a total of 45 copies in 5 days, actually had 1114 different players contacting the leader board server.”

That comes down 96% of download were pirated thus costing the developer $2,138 in the first 5 days the App went on sale.

Via: iPhone World

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Comments

  1. This isn’t a ‘pro piracy’ comment, but people often fail to take into account that the majority of folks that use pirated apps would never have bought it even were it not freely available.

    Posted by vaelek on July 29, 2009 9:36 PM

  2. Agree completely. They didn’t cost anyone anything. Cost assumes those people would have paid if they had to pay to get the app. Is always faulty logic.

    Posted by Chris on July 29, 2009 11:16 PM

  3. ...not exactly.  How many of those people who downloaded pirated copies might have bought the game, until they read online about how pirated copies >were< an option…?

    Posted by benjitek on July 30, 2009 4:03 AM

  4. ...on the flip side. I actually had never purchased anything from the AppStore before this ability came about and just stuck to free or Cydia apps. Only after being able to actually try things first have I been able to weed out apps that I would have definitely regretted buying for the ones that are actually worth it. There is an incredible amount of pure crap available, and with 25 different versions of the same thing, it’s anyone’s guess which is really for you.

    Of course there will be people who might have purchased something if it was not available cracked. There’s no real way to accurately measure the number of people on all sides of the fence, but there have been quite a few arguments on the marketing benefits of piracy, as well as the fact that a large number folks who use cracked apps would have never bought them either way.

    It would be interesting to see the results if it were possible to conduct an accurate survey on the topic.

    Posted by vaelek on July 31, 2009 5:27 PM

  5. That is a significant amount of money that you are losing out on.  This goes to show that piracy is rampant not only on computers, but on all sorts of electronic devices.

    Posted by Sam on August 4, 2009 1:05 PM

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