iCombat

As we get set to launch our first iPhone application in the coming weeks I have started to see some discussion around the piracy issue in the App store.  The release of Crackulous has caused concern because of the supposed ease with which it makes sharing a cracked app easy – removing all of the complexity that keeps most people from engaging in app piracy in the first place.

iPhoneSavior wrote a post recently about how Imaginuity New Media’s new game Rocky Artue had been cracked and was being downloaded online hundreds of times for free.  Perhaps most interesting was the fact that they discovered that the game had been cracked through the use of Pinch Media’s user analytic tools.  While Pinch Media markets their mobile analytics solutions more for usage behavior (as seen in their AppStore Secrets presentation so widelyin the press over the last week) their ability to audit App store data by comparing actual downloads to App store downloads may become increasingly relevant to developers.

Quoting an e-mail to Imaginuity founder Allen Restrepo from Pinch Media’s Jesse Rowland (from the iPhoneSavior post):

“Unfortunately I have bad news for you that you might not want to hear. We typically see these large discrepancies between our numbers and Apple’s for paid applications that have been pirated.  I did a quick search for cracked versions of your application in the wild, and like most, it’s definitely available for people to steal. Your case is actually one of the largest cases of piracy we’ve seen where typically we see paid applications receiving around 5x more users from piracy then from legitimate downloads.”

The question of just how bad is App store piracy is one that I haven’t really found many answers to yet.  Part of the problem I imagine is that no developer really wants to put out press releases announcing to the world that their application has been cracked.  And writing about the problem might only contribute to the issue (I cringe at the thought that I may be helping propagate Crackulous by even mentioning it) but what is the alternative? By putting the burden of cracking an application on only one person and making it easier for everyone else to follow, Crackulous could be the application that makes App store piracy grow exponentially (especially amongst the high school and college kids that are the most active application users).

While the good news is that we can quantify whether the problem is ocurring at all on our own applications by using analytics tools already out there, the question though is what about blocking piracy altogether?  While developers have to primarily look to Apple for protection, there do seem to be a few solutions developers can choose from.  TUAW wrote about Ripdev’s launching an anti-piracy service several weeks ago here and while it seems to be an effective solution, it certainly isn’t cheap.  It requires an upfront fee and a percentage of revenue generated (varying depending on volume of sales), for pricing see here (PDF).  While this seems like a very high price to pay, it could be well worth it if Jesse Rowland’s statement that “paid applications [are] receiving around 5x more users from piracy then from legitimate downloads” is correct.

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