App Piracy: Pandemic or Promoter?

With troubling numbers coming out of different developer camps like Beejive (server based) reporting that 70% to 80% of users are accessing the server from pirated apps. The pirating forefront looks to be rampant now and days, which is not hard to believe with the simplicity of getting them from Install0us which we admit- we show you how-to’s for educational purposes only.

But is all pirating bad? Iphone Download Blog believes it is not:

Crackers Would Not Buy the App Anyway

In my article about the new Install0us last week, iDB reader Polemicist commented on it and basically said that if someone downloads a cracked version of an app, he probably would have never bought it in the first place anyways, so there is no real loss of revenue.

Really good points. Most Music piraters probably would not spend the money on most of there albums- no way they could even afford that much music. Same may go for many of the apps. Younger, jobless teenagers and kids with no money are not going to get there parents to buy all these hundreds of apps they are curious about so in piratings defense- of the 80% avg. of piraters, most would never really pay for the app if jailbreaking did not exist.

One good thing pirating can do is help promote the application. Say that broke Ray downloads the jailbroken new Call of Duty World at War: Zombies. He does not have the $9.99 to pay for it but he comments on his Facebook page “New COD WOW Zombie App Rocks”. His facebook friends, Steve and Joe see this as assurance of an app they should purchase and give it a try. This is much better promotion then any iPhone App Review site saying to go buy it.

Now- this is not to say that pirating is a good thing. Its to say that all pirating is not bad. As the saying goes, any publicity is good publicity. Of course it is impossible to really know the ratio of sales loss- to if jailbreaking did not exist because it does. So we deal with it. Apple is always looking to slow down jailbreaking, if you have not heard- the newer “MC models” are having trouble jailbreaking. Hey its a start developers.