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iPhone piracy – the cold hard figures: 96% illegal downloads

July 27, 2009 by iPhoneWorld.ca Reader  

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The developer of The Little Tank That Could iPhone game writes:

After the first release of my iPhone game ‘the little tank that could’, I was very excited. I thought the game was fun to play, and could possibly do very well on the appstore. That turned out not to be the case. For the first 5 days on the store, it sold 20, 10, 5, 2 and 8 copies. A total of 45 copies sold. That was disheartening.

iphone piracy

To my astonishment, I found out that ‘the little tank that could’, which sold a total of 45 copies in 5 days, actually had 1114 different players contacting the leader board server.

There is a full writeup on this here.

No doubt the same situation is affecting other developers as well and this once again brings up the question of whether those that pirate games and other apps would have bought them in the first place.

But in this case the stats are just amazing: 45 sold copies and 1114 players that used the scoreboard (and potentially not everyone that plays the game would have used it) amount to at least 96% illegal downloads.

In a situation like this one Apple has to rethink its copy protection measures due to widespread availability of tools like Crackulous that appear to break the protection with each and virtually 0 knowledge on the part of the user. Furthermore, Apple should take proactive measures to target and shut down sites that offer pirated versions of apps to download.

And an even better solution for Apple would to allow developers to use their own APIs for custom protection schemes, although hell will probably freeze over before this will happen.


 


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Related posts:

  1. Interview with the developer of The Little Tank That Could game about iPhone apps piracy and more
  2. “Little Tank That Could” iPhone game v3.0 submitted to AppStore
  3. iPhone App Downloads Continue to Rise: 1.5 billion downloads in 1 year

iPhone piracy – the cold hard figures: 96% illegal downloads

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  • Usopp

    Your google ad next to your article exclaims “Iphone 3.0 unlock available now”. Seems like a pervasive problem.

  • iphonew

    Actually you don't need to have an unlocked iPhone to run pirated apps… You just need to jailbreak it.

    Unlock procedure itself only opens your iPhone so you could use it with any carrier.

  • Taras

    Is it possible that kids that have this on their iPod Touch or iPhone may be sharing their hardware, and not the software? Was any research done to whether multiple scoreboard entries can be made from the same copy of the game?

  • iphonew

    Taras, that's a good question. We're going to feature a full interview with the developer within the next few days to answer this and other questions anyone might have.

  • iphonew

    Taras, that's a good question. We're going to feature a full interview with the developer within the next few days to answer this and other questions anyone might have.

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