Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Cost of App Store Piracy Pegged at $450 Million

Each pirate downloading 510 apps??!!

I read the full article and it just doesn't add up...

Estimated iPhones and iPod touches sold: 75,000,000
Estimated jailbroken iPhones/iPod touches: 7,500,000 (10% of total)
Estimated jailbroken who use pirated software: 3,000,000 (40% of jailbroken)
Estimated number of pirated apps downloaded: 1,530,000,000
Number of pirated apps on each jailbroken phone with pirated apps on them: 510
(1.53 billion apps divided by 3 million )

Really? Are these pirates actually loading 510 apps onto their iPhones/iPods?
 
Digital Skunk said:
A good deal of the people buying the phone can't afford either! I've sold many a phone to customers with cold hard cash, full price, and some with terrible credit yielding deposits of $500 or more.

I am a Pro Developer kind of guy, but with the money that the App store IS making, I could care less about that $0.99 that just left some devo's pocket.
Click to expand...

You are a "pro developer kind of guy"...but yet you sit there and say its okay for them to lose money because of how much money there is to be made in the market. Wow buddy you sound just like our politicians. Oil execs make way too much money (they are successful) so you want to take their money right? Wow, communist much?
 
generuss said:
I think the devs are wrong here.

I can only speak for myself but this is the situation for me with apps and programs.

For example, photoshop cs2 (or what ever cs), lets say i download that from any torrent site, I will download it becuase I can get it for free. If there was no way for me to get it for free, I would never download it or buy it. In that case the developer dont loose any money at all from me.
Same thing with apps on app store.
FIFA10? Yeah I wanna try that! But do I wanna buy it? Hell no! Too expensive!
Can I get it for free? Then allright, I download it!
No way to get it for free? Allright, then I wont download it.
Click to expand...

AFAIK this is right for most cases.
 
cublah said:
I have analytics in my app and I can confirm that I am getting 2.8 pirated versions to each 1 sold on the App Store.
Click to expand...

I am guessing your getting these stats from how many times it has been downloaded vs. the number of times it has been paid for. And at first this would make logical sense that this is a valid way to do it, but then you have to factor in the legitimate redownloads. I know I have downloaded many of my paid apps several times, sometimes 4 or 5 times for one reason or another. Once it is paid for, you can download it over and over again... doesn't mean I'm pirating it (I don't pirate anything), it may be that I just wiped my phone, or I purchased it on my phone and downloaded it to my laptop or vice versa, or something of that nature. I would say that on average I download every paid app 2 to 3 times.
 
Speedy2 said:
What has this to do with the question stealing yes/no?
I never said that piracy has no effect on the revenue of the software developer, quite the opposite.
Click to expand...

"Software piracy doesn't take anything away from person B, other than a highly undetermined potential profit."

Your words.

Piracy is a crime, but it's not the same as theft. You can spread a pirated software a million times and cause much more damage than with a simple theft of property. On the other hand, by illegally downloading Photoshop you don't automatically create a loss of $800 for Adobe.
Click to expand...

This is true, but in the same way that stealing a candy bar and stealing a car are both theft, piracy is also. Kind of how chicken pox and shingles are both herpes; it's a class of crime, not a specific one...
 
Westside guy said:
I think you're falling into the trap of arguing with a person (or persons) who uses misdirection and pedantry to dance around the actual issue at hand. In other words, you're letting him define the argument.
Click to expand...

Trap? Misdirection? Pedantry? The world seems to be a place of very easy mechanisms for you.

Try and tell that to a judge and see how smart and superior you'll feel then.
 
Vidd said:
Well no, it's not if you never intended to buy it in the first place.
Click to expand...

Then why would you pirate it if you weren't going to buy it? Because you would only buy something you intended on using, right? So, theoretically, you have no real use for this app, you're just getting it cause you can.
 
CylonGlitch said:
I am guessing your getting these stats from how many times it has been downloaded vs. the number of times it has been paid for. And at first this would make logical sense that this is a valid way to do it, but then you have to factor in the legitimate redownloads. I know I have downloaded many of my paid apps several times, sometimes 4 or 5 times for one reason or another. Once it is paid for, you can download it over and over again... doesn't mean I'm pirating it (I don't pirate anything), it may be that I just wiped my phone, or I purchased it on my phone and downloaded it to my laptop or vice versa, or something of that nature. I would say that on average I download every paid app 2 to 3 times.
Click to expand...

Well said. The whole thing is fudged.
 
disconap said:
"Software piracy doesn't take anything away from person B, other than a highly undetermined potential profit."

Your words.
Click to expand...


How exactly does that contradict your statement?
I'm putting the emphasis somewhere else, doesn't mean I deny the "potential profit" part.


disconap said:
This is true, but in the same way that stealing a candy bar and stealing a car are both theft, piracy is also. Kind of how chicken pox and shingles are both herpes; it's a class of crime, not a specific one...
Click to expand...


Nope.
 
i'm glad to see i'm not the only one suprised by this. theoretically i understand that you can pirate. but why? 1 usd for a nice game...why pirate? and how? it's so tightly connected to itunes?

well - nonetheless - app store is a hit. maybe pirating is a reason for this? the iphone was hacked and had an inofficial app store before the official app store...i guess that was also a "sign" where apple should go. usually when there is a grassroot activity like this - there is a relevant market.
 
ELScorcho9 said:
Then why would you pirate it if you weren't going to buy it? Because you would only buy something you intended on using, right? So, theoretically, you have no real use for this app, you're just getting it cause you can.
Click to expand...

How about - you have a use for the app but feel it's overpriced?

Take TomTom for example. £10 and I would have bought it. Millions more would have. £70 is a rip off.

So we ripped them off.
 
jlasoon said:
Unfortunately you have an IQ of room temperature. I'll leave it at that.
Click to expand...

It was an A to B comparison; saying that prevalence makes something ok is a flawed argument. Why I have to explain this to you when you apparently have a much higher IQ is beyond me.
 
johncarync said:
I read the full article and it just doesn't add up...

Estimated iPhones and iPod touches sold: 75,000,000
Estimated jailbroken iPhones/iPod touches: 7,500,000 (10% of total)
Estimated jailbroken who use pirated software: 3,000,000 (40% of jailbroken)
Estimated number of pirated apps downloaded: 1,530,000,000
Number of pirated apps on each jailbroken phone with pirated apps on them: 510
(1.53 billion apps divided by 3 million )

Really? Are these pirates actually loading 510 apps onto their iPhones/iPods?
Click to expand...

No. The pirates are probably grabbing torrents containing hundreds of applications. I'm aware that the main problem with piracy on the Nintendo DS was the availability of torrents containing hundreds of games, so the same is probably also happening here.
 
freddiecable said:
i'm glad to see i'm not the only one suprised by this. theoretically i understand that you can pirate. but why? 1 usd for a nice game...why pirate? and how? it's so tightly connected to itunes?

well - nonetheless - app store is a hit. maybe pirating is a reason for this? the iphone was hacked and had an inofficial app store before the official app store...i guess that was also a "sign" where apple should go. usually when there is a grassroot activity like this - there is a relevant market.
Click to expand...

Pirate apps are not obtained through iTunes.

You download them through other sites and install them using installous etc when you're jailbroken.
 
powerbook911 said:
What are they talking about???

I didn't even know App Store piracy existed. This story seems a bit wild.
Click to expand...

let me explain to you this very simple. There are a lots of webpages that tells you what to do in a step by step kind of way that let you fill out your iPod Touch or iPhone with everything you want from the iTunes Store. How do I know this? I send a prepaid app to my nephew and he call me back saying that his iPod Touch is full because he follows this instructions from the net, I ask him what page and he ended up saying a lot of names then I went to one he told me and there's a new pirate world out there that we all old school Mac users don't know about it. It's sad but I remember when I used to do wrong things with my performa 6300CD back in the day on a secret web comunity called Hotline ... 56k modem big files for free you just needed to wait a day or two. I regret that today. Today I bought everything I install on my Macs but nothing is impossible these days with this tech kidz now days... It's another world.
 
The author of this article is an idiot and clearly doesn't understand how iPhones work. As others have said, first you have to jailbreak the phone, then you have to go out and find the apps online to download (usually through torrent sites). Even still, I would argue the majority of people who jailbreak are doing it to gain tethering, cycorder, etc, not so they can download a bunch of crappy apps and load them onto their phone for free.
 
disconap said:
As much as I appreciate the civility of your argument, it is flawed. Sodomy is consensual, piracy is not.
Click to expand...

I really do not think it is a matter of consensual agreement, but more a matter of societal mores. For whatever reason piracy does not seam to pull at some people's moral compass the way shoplifting does, and it appears the number of people grows tremendously every year.

I am concerned that eventually a tipping point will be reached where society has rejected the theft of intellectual property as a moral offense and regulated it to acceptable and appropriate behavior.
 
johncarync said:
I read the full article and it just doesn't add up...
...
Estimated jailbroken iPhones/iPod touches: 7,500,000 (10% of total)
...
Really? Are these pirates actually loading 510 apps onto their iPhones/iPods?
Click to expand...

i really doubt only 10% of all idevices are jailbroken, i'll say at least 40% are..

510 apps for a jailbroken device who has Categories?? piece of cake.

i had over 400 legit apps (paid and free) but the 10 page limit of my nonJB forced me to do a hard filtering..
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back