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General I believe there is an ulterior motive for installuous being shut down.
- Thread starter tymaster50
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Workaround: Make app free, charge for service through an IAP?
I've been away for awhile, but when I was developing there was a new process for verifying the legitimacy of an app by checking a certificate stored in the app bundle. Did that never end up happening, or did it get circumvented by Installous?
There used to be a handful of ways to detect a pirated copy without creating a false-positive for paid versions that reside on jailbroken devices.
I agree, though, Apple should have done something about this 3 years ago. The fact that it's still a problem shows how little they care.
You should see it as lost revenue. It's costing the industry hundreds of millions in revenue today.
He comes in saying the same thing on every piracy thread
I'm not pro-piracy, but a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale, and if you need to use piracy to justify lower than expected sales figures, you have other much bigger problems.
I disagree with the above statement because i have friends that download films and when i go to theirs the only ones i will ever watch are the ones that i would never ever think about watch in the cinema, rental or buying the DVD, so in my case that is not true. Matter of fact some of the films i have liked and gone out and brought on DVD so they have gained money from me.
(Not trying to say what i have done is right but just stating the facts)
Where as films that i think i would like i buy or use my cinema pass which entitles me to go to any showing for £14.99 a month.... and there has been many times i have regretted it and thought you know what i should have just watched that at my mates because its was rubbish and has wasted my evening.
At the end of the day people will do what they like so the best way to solve these issues is to make the service easy to use as cheap as possible without losing money, listen to the customer and STOP ADVERTISING ALL THESE SERVICE THAT ALLOW YOU TO PIRATE STUFF because most of my friends didn't even know about them till they were all over the news/internet.
Part of my daily routine is to check AppShopper for what is free each day.
As for pirated apps, I have JB LOTS of devices, for both me and other people. None of them use any illegal apps. I don't even tell people for whom I help them JB their device that there is even such a thing. I just set up their device with the MUST have tweaks to make an iOS useful and not a PITA!
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Piracy is going to happen, period.
Companies should stop wasting time and money trying to prevent it and just put that money into their product development or in their employees hands.
Waste all that time developing anti piracy measures and before you know it, it's been circumvented.
Money ends up being a waste
Companies should stop wasting time and money trying to prevent it and just put that money into their product development or in their employees hands.
Waste all that time developing anti piracy measures and before you know it, it's been circumvented.
Money ends up being a waste
Spoken like a true pirate.
Piracy can be avoided if you are persistent and understand the techniques necessary to thwart it.
Developers do need to keep bugging Apple for a receipt system that ties a purchase to a specific set of hardware addresses in an iTunes account, but until that happens it can still be stopped with some effort.
It is worth doing, and can be measured in hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for a popular app.
So name one popular application that has done this successfully so far.
Adobe Suite - No.
Microsoft Windows - No.
Microsoft Office - No.
Logic/Final Cut - No.
I could keep going for hours, but I won't.
If a human can make it, a human can break it. Personally, as I explained in that other long ass piracy thread - it's much better to monetize piracy, than to waste resources trying to stop it. And no doubt because of this you'll accuse me of being a pirate - I'm not. I'm actually a developer, but I'm not a developer who buries my head in the sand, or believes in massively deflated sales figures due to piracy.
Why do you think Apple has always had such lax anti-piracy methods in their software? They'd rather spend that money developing features and making people better for the people that DO buy the app. Instead of trying to thwart pirates who will pirate anyway, depriving genuine customers of features that could have been developed with the cash spent on deterring pirates.
Piracy CAN be stopped. Garmin managed to make their app pirate-proof, so it can be done.
And usually (at least from software that has multiple people working on it) they will have a separate person or division handling the piracy aspect of the software.
He comes in saying the same thing on every piracy thread
I'm not pro-piracy, but a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale, and if you need to use piracy to justify lower than expected sales figures, you have other much bigger problems.
You are wrong, and our own sales figures refute your supposition.
We have had apps cracked, and sales drop off dramatically. We logged device identification information and then tied this back to purchases of the app once we forced an upgrade and stopped the ability to crack and run the app.
Sales increased, and many of the users who once ran the cracker version purchased the real version.
Piracy absolutely results in lost sales, and anyone who thinks otherwise is simply mistaken.
i'm sure you are right, but it won't be a 100% recovery rate, as you have the actual figures how many of the cracked app users did eventually buy the official app?
No, I am not wrong. And if you are justifying your product's poor performance by blaming piracy, then you have serious problems with it and/or your business model that you need to address. Developing software is a business, and in business, you need to take into account, and deal with, risks.
I'll bet you any money that you spent more developing the massive anti-piracu solution, than you collected in profit from converted pirates. You're never going to recover that much money - pirates will just find an alternative (and lets face it, if the likes of MS/Adobe can't do it with their massive financial buckets).
I monetized them in other ways - such as not limiting functionality, but displaying a permanent reminded to buy the app if you like it. That, and selling support tickets to pirated users - one support ticket is more than enough to offset the functional development cost of a product.
What a logic! "Thieves are going to steal from your house...so, stop trying to buy alarms/locks, and instead, put that money into buying better stuff or give it to your family members."
Terrible analogy.
Piracy isn't really stealing. It's copying.
When something is stolen, you no longer have it, when something is pirated, you both have it.
You steal someone's stuff from their home they don't have what they paid for any more - totally different concept.
Also alarms are pointless. By the time the alarm company calls the homeowner, the police, the dispatcher dispatches the police, the cops travel to get there, the crooks are long gone.
With piracy, it's a waste of money to continuously fight it.
You put copy protection on an app, you spend r&d dollars on it, time, manpower, then a week-a month later some brilliant hacker circumvents your methods making it available to all.
You find another way after spending even more, a month later it's hacked and you then have wasted all your money and time that could have been spent improving things got those that do pay.
The cycle continues on and on
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No, it can't be stopped because as hard as someone works to prevent it, give it a month and someone else has a way to break it making that money spent totally wasted.
Lol at the Xbox 360- they would change the way the games were done breaking old methods of piracy, but not even a week later a replacement method was in place.
Even Nintendo and Sony had to deal with it.
Sony even bragged that the ps3 was hack proof as Microsoft had done with Windoze 7.
Hackers keep proving them wrong
If I were to abritrarily assign a percentage that relates to jailbreakers, I would say: 50% of people who jailbreak their phones do it for cosmetic reasons.
Lol. Amazing how some people essentially think "once a pirate, always a pirate". I admit to using Installous and have tried many apps from it before... but it has saved me several dollars in the long run. I didn't save money in the sense that I kept the app and didn't bother to actually buy it, but I saved money by knowing which apps I really did like. For instance, I tried Angry Birds through Installous because I was considering purchasing on the App Store, and wanted a little more than the "lite" version. Turns out I didn't enjoy it as much as I did, so what did I do? Delete it.
I also tried the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock. which I loved. So with the credit I had from a gift card on my iTunes account, I bought the app. Lol, I ended up spending $1 instead of $2, by trying Angry Birds to see how I felt about the app. Okay, I only saved a dollar. So what? Not all of us are well off and have high paying jobs. A dollar could easily get me a different app that I may enjoy or a small meal.
I also tried the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock. which I loved. So with the credit I had from a gift card on my iTunes account, I bought the app. Lol, I ended up spending $1 instead of $2, by trying Angry Birds to see how I felt about the app. Okay, I only saved a dollar. So what? Not all of us are well off and have high paying jobs. A dollar could easily get me a different app that I may enjoy or a small meal.
Not trying to rehash pirating here - do you have any sources on any malware effecting iOS, jailbroken or not, actually happening?
I don't see the same security risk you feel is there. Sure, it may be theoretically less secure, but I have never heard of any cases of it in practice, online or otherwise.
Hahaha. I paid like fifty bucks for this app. I wonder how many people are buying this app now that Google Maps has voice navigation
However its also an undeniable fact that all iOS pirates do indeed Jailbreak.