Not-So-Rampant Piracy On The iPhone?

Great post Ken. That's something I've been thinking about lately with all the piracy talk. We have a total of 6 working iDevices in the house, 4 of them iPhones and iTouches. The whole family uses the same iTunes account so anything any of us buys works on all of our devices whether it's music, movies or apps. That means there's four copies of Charmed in use in my house alone from a single purchase. A feel like I owe you $9!

Q

 

Hi,

My thanks to the OP for bringing this up.

As a customer, and not a pirate, I have been wondering about the numbers and how they can be so high.

Also have brought up the policy of apple allowing each device tied into a single account being able to use any app tied to that account.

As a consumer, I like it, and hope it does not change.

I can see, as a developer would, that it may eat into possible income developing for the Iphone.

David

 

App Sharing may contribute to the factor but merely a portion on it. The top app piracy directory is getting about a million of unique visitors daily and 20% of those traffic comes from the United States and this is just one site So yeah, piracy is still at a very bad level.

 

The 90-95% figures come from apps checking for modified files in the bundle or something so they can tell real pirates. Pinch Media's library does it and I guess some people do it themselves in code.

 

People have claimed (possibly even in this forum), 90%+ piracy using Pinch's system. I think the conclusion was that it was only for the first day or so though. There is an interview with a guy from Pinch on a Mobile Orchard podcast where I think he confirmed this.

 

I'm not sure what the 5 systems has to do with it. It's always been like that, not just with apps, but with everything on the iTMS. I don't find anything wrong with that -- actually, I think it's good. It means my wife and I don't have to buy everything twice, which is pretty absurd.

Piracy levels themselves are quite high though, especially with the more popular titles. But that comes with the territory, unfortunately. Doesn't matter what system you're developing for, you're going to be developing for at least as many pirates as legit customers, especially on systems that are easy to pirate on. (PC and Mac, mainly.) It's been that way since there was something to pirate, and the Internet has only made it easier. You have to take a pragmatic view and deal with it however you feel is best, with a mind to the idea that you aren't going to stop it. That sucks, but that's the reality you have to face.

As I understand it there are ways to detect piracy in-code, and it's possible for developers to take actions based on whether it detects a pirated copy. I don't know how much access hackers have to the packages and whether they can actually crack iPhone apps in the same manner as desktop apps (aren't iPhone apps encrypted?) so I don't know how effective doing such a thing is, but there it is anyway.

 

Agreed, I think it's great that if you buy an app in iTunes you can use it multiple devices. There's a lot of games my girlfriend plays on my iPod Touch, and she decides to get an iPhone, we'll share an iTunes account so she doesn't have to re-buy all those games.

 

True enough, though it's hard to determine how many households have multiple devices. I do know there are qiute a few developers who have built-in piracy detection that quietly phone home to transmit numbers so developers can gauge piracy levels. (Most of them don't do anything beyond that, like cripple the game in any way, though there have been a few.) That's really the only true way to gauge piracy levels, but you'd have to get such developers to share those numbers to get a big enough picture on how bad it really is.

 

Interesting about that survey you did, because out of the 10 or so people I know with iDevices, I think most, probably 8/10 have them jailbroken and are pirating games. Mine included (minus the pirated games, although I admit to trying it out before hand).

Must vary with people, environements or age group, etc.

 

It varies by each group. I know at least 10 people with iPhones, and I am the only one that has a jailbroken device. If this was High School or college, I would probably see a much higher number.

If the OPs statements are true (and I have a feeling they are), that would explain why the supposed piracy approaches 95%. That would only require sharing the game with one other person for each copy that is out there. We've never seen anything even close to the rampant 90%.

Another poster posted something about a Piracy site with 1 million visitors. We have certainly never seen our game pirated anywhere near 1 million- the actual piracy numbers are insignificant.

My girlfriend has an iPhone and we have separate accounts. We don't share anything- well except for Flickitty. But she has a provision for that.

 

I hope my post didn't slant the view of yours negatively. I certainly like the iTunes policy as well. It works quite nicely for my family, especially my wife and son who are avid gamers. We'd go broke if we had to buy every game 2-3 times!

Q

 

I like the itunes policy as well it actually was a major factor when me and my partner decided to get a Ipod Touch each that we could share the same itunes account

 

Our pirate tracking system is not affected at all by sales or app sharing. If you have read the article you would know how we do it. It's quite simple actually. We just check for a certain difference on the cracked version installation compared to store-bought version installation. It has nothing to do with sales numbers or app sharing.
http://smellslikedonkey.com/wordpress/?page_id=274

Read it all the way to end if you like to understand what we fell about it overall.

edit: I would like to add that perhaps other devs are just simply comparing the high scores submissions to their sales numbers, but unless they explain their process, no one can be sure.

 

Great post OP, makes a lot of sense.

I know this is highly true, as my iTunes account is used on 7 iDevices, everyone in my family has one and I put the account on all the computers. My gf syncs her touch to my computer, and my best friend uses the 5th account for his.

Multiple devices can be synced to one computer and that doesn't take away from the 5 computers you can authorize. I could sync 30 devices to my one computer and share the app to every single one of them and not have a problem.

And you can also just log yourself in on others' devices and install an app for them that you may own and log back out, the app works perfectly fine. So they don't even need to sync with one of your authorized computers. The 5 computer limit is very flexible.

Obviously I may not represent the normal user, but it shows that it happens and each app sale could be waay less than $.14 for a developer. But also, not everyone wants every app that I get, so only a few are actually shared between all of us.

 

Another way that has been used to estimate piracy is to simply look at the download numbers for your cracked app from filesharing sites and compare that with the numbers from iTunes.

 

That's a fairly bad way to get an estimate though, right? I can go and download a linux program right now, but I won't be able to actually use it. Same goes from cracked apps. I can even download them three or four or twenty times. ...Or write a program to do it for me.

In my opinion, unless a dev offers precise details on how the number of pirates was discovered it should be viewed as bogus. It's just too easy to make stuff up or twist numbers so they prove your point.