Ahoy Matey, Keep a Sharp Eye for the App Pirates!
There is a controversial report circulating on the blogs lately claiming that app pirates are getting away with treason on the high seas of Apple’s app store. Reports have suggested that App store piracy has cost Apple and contributing app store developers upwards of $450 million in lost revenue since the app store opened in July of 2008. 24/7Wall St. is basing this conclusion on research conducted by an investment research analyst at Sandford Bernstein, Toni Sacconaghi. Unfortunately you have to buy his report to get the exact goods, but the rough number is based on several estimates regarding the proportion of downloads that are paid applications, the piracy rate for paid applications, and the proportion of pirated app users who would have paid for the applications had pirated versions not been available.
Response to this research report has been mixed. By far, the majority are in denial. To quote a recent comment on Macrumors: ” I understand that iPhone piracy is theoretically possible, but how can they possibly suggest that 75% of all apps in circulation are on the devices of users who are savvy enough to figure out how to do it?! That’s simply absurd. You can’t simply download an iPhone app like you would download a copy of Windows or Photoshop. The authors of this report obviously don’t know that.” When you really think about the numbers, the claim does seem rather outlandish.
On the other side, we have those who are buying the argument, after all, in pirate speak, the existence of the sea means the existence of pirates. Another comment on Macrumors backs this up: “Piracy among the jailbreaking community is rampant. That is one of many reasons why I am now opposed to jailbreaking. The other reason is because jailbreaking destroys the security model leaving the iPhone vulnerable to malware.” Certainly sites like Pirateapps.com would seem to indicate that there is a jailbroken community out there making use of apps from Cydia without having to pay for them.
Other discussions also point out that certain assumptions made by 24/7 Wall Street don’t make too much sense. For example, they assumed that there are 3 illegal app downloads for every legitimate downloads. Hmm… That’s 1.53 billion apps illegally downloaded. It really seemed a bit high considering Apple just celebrated their 3 billionth download this month! Sure, may be there are 7 million jailbroken iPhones, but can they really make up for half of the legitimately downloaded apps, including the free ones?
Apple has been mute on the subject, causing frustration among developers. This stance seems to echo their apparent indifference to illegal music downloads on iPods. One wonders if Apple will close the back door and start clamping down on jailbreakers, and pirates. They will have to build a large and sturdy brig if they would hope to rid the high seas of the app store of the scoundrels!
This is an article by The Apps Machine.
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