{"id":3933,"date":"2010-01-14T15:18:35","date_gmt":"2010-01-14T21:18:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.redmonk.com\/cote\/2010\/01\/14\/piracy\/"},"modified":"2010-01-14T15:18:35","modified_gmt":"2010-01-14T21:18:35","slug":"piracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/2010\/01\/14\/piracy\/","title":{"rendered":"App Store Piracy – one developer's take"},"content":{"rendered":"

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According to analysis by 24\/7 Wall St.<\/a>, Apple and App Store software developers have lost more than $450 million to piracy since the store’s launch in July 2008. Who’s to blame? Jailbreakers. Users who jailbreak their iPhones<\/a> can do a number of things that Apple doesn’t approve of, such as modifying the operating system or installing programs that don’t come from the App Store–programs that they would otherwise have to pay for.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Josh Knowles<\/a>, one of my fellow Austin-native friends from way back, told me recently that his firm’s iPhone game, Critter Defense<\/a>, was pirated more than bought. I was naively shocked to hear that piracy even happened in the iPhone world. But of course it does: so long as you unlock your phone and surf the piracy sites. I was reminded of that conversation over beers by Jeff Bertolucci’s piece today on the same topic<\/a>, quoted above.<\/p>\n

So, I asked Josh if he’d comment on it post-beers. He said:<\/p>\n

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[W]e see about 85-90% piracy rates. We know this because we ask all players to create a simple user account (really just a screen name) before any score will post to the global high scores list. We see about 8-10 new user accounts in our system for each sale that shows up in Apple’s iTunesConnect system.<\/p>\n

We had a significantly lower piracy rate at first (<50% for sure, although I don’t know exactly) until we were featured on the front page of a major hacked apps website. On that day we saw ~5000% increase over our average daily new user accounts (which was awesome), but at about 99% piracy rate. Since then we’ve settled on this ~85-90% piracy rate.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

He went on to say that while he’s annoyed, he’s tolerated it because of the business the app help drives in the rest of his life. The exposure, experience, and reputation they get from iPhone app development translates directly into cash for consulting and other projects. Indeed, over the years Josh has carved out an excellent niche for himself<\/a> in innovating and developing social, mobile, and gaming projects, like any good ITP<\/a> alum would.<\/p>\n

The implication for those who do want more direct monetization, of course, is to figure out ways of getting cash outside of just the AppStore – Evernote<\/a> is an easy example here: their app is free, but you can pay for more storage and features on the backend. The WordPress app<\/a> fits here, and you can imagine people like Dragon hooking their text-to-speech application<\/a> up to a service who’s billing is done outside the confines of iPhone-land.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One iPhone app developer’s experience with App Store piracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,36],"tags":[106,387,477],"class_list":["post-3933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-marketing","category-the-new-thing","tag-appstore","tag-iphone","tag-marketplace"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3933"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3933\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/cote\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}