

iOS app piracy soars - maskofsanity
http://www.scmagazine.com.au/News/316996,special-report-ios-app-piracy-soars.aspx

======
TomFrost
I'm sorry to say I was once heavily involved in this. I am Kyek, or "Kytek" as
the article misspelled. Among other things, I wrote and maintained Appulo.us,
and the quote at the end of the article is mine.

While many called BS on the whole "we do it for trials" aspect -- and who can
blame them? -- that is, in fact, how this all started. A small group of people
on IRC and a forum, who figured out how astonishingly easy it was to dump the
entire unencrypted executable from RAM, who shared apps among each other
because those little $1-5 purchases added up to a lot when the apps proved
misrepresented and worthless. Back then, it was far more common that reviews
were gamed and descriptions were blatantly false, and 'lite' versions were
quite rare.

I eventually left when that dynamic became an obvious foregone conclusion, and
only a very small handful of us continued to purchase the apps that we
intended to keep. Frustratingly enough, those who remained and admitted behind
closed doors that they were in it for the free apps kept up that mantra, so it
became far more of a joke than a meaningful message. I'd have loved to see
Apple innovate and find a way to offer developers an easy method of providing
time or usage-limited trials, but their response was to dump money into legal
rather than R&D.

This article is really nothing new; nothing has changed much from a standpoint
of the piracy or Apple's reaction to it since Appulous launched, except
Apple's methods are more streamlined and so are the pirates'. However, this
article makes the same misleading assumption that all the articles of the past
made: They assume that every pirated app is a missed sale.

When you report that 92% of your application's installs are pirated copies,
the implication is strong that you've missed out on 92% of sales. That's
simply not the case. Many people -- and let's be realistic with the
demographic, many young teens who may not even have access to purchase apps on
their own -- install these apps just because they're free. If piracy weren't
as easily available, I have no doubt that the 92% figure would shrink in
direct proportion to the number of installs. Reporting otherwise is wholly
inaccurate, and exaggerates the impact that this community has had. And I say
that as someone who hasn't supported the community and in fact has spoken out
against it for years.

Appulous was an education for me. It taught me about running seriously high-
traffic sites, and query optimization and caching algorithms unlike anything I
thought I'd ever dig into. Over the past five years that's transported me
professionally into a great position where I get to coach dev teams through
that kind of work daily, and continue innovating and learning about scalable
design. As a vehicle for rapid improvement in my trade, it was a fantastic
opportunity. But as for the the lasting impact my contributions have had on
the topic and on indie developers, I'm deeply regretful, and disappointed.
Apptrackr's proved that if it weren't me, it would have been someone else;
it's just a shame that the agenda has switched so obviously from pushing for a
better app store to enabling single-tap piracy -- regardless of the _actual_
impact that might have on sales.

~~~
AUmrysh
Hello, Kyek. I was also involved in this. I am happy to see you here as I
remember your work. I remember when people figured out that GDB would let you
dump the decrypted memory and you could put it back into the main executable
file with a hex editor or dd. I can't help but think the real tragedy is that
apple didn't work to make it harder to pirate apps. I really think they missed
out on this.

------
truebecomefalse
It is very old news that any iPhone app can be cracked easily. This article
has no information at all related to the amount of actual piracy going on.

'99% of all apps have been cracked!' != '99% of all app downloads are theft'

------
elithrar
> The security vendor said more than 92 percent of paid iOS apps were pirated

But what % of the total user-base actually pirate apps? That is the more
important figure.

As an aside: I've "educated" a few acquaintances re: pirating apps on their
jailbroken devices. They indicated they getting apps for "free" was a benefit
of jailbreaking. I responded by telling them that many of the apps they'd
jailbroken were not built by large corporations, but actually indie dev houses
or even lone developers. When they realised they weren't 'sticking it to The
Man' they appeared to boast a little less about this particular benefit.

Whether it actually changed their behaviour is another thing.

~~~
norswap
> But what % of the total user-base actually pirate apps? That is the more
> important figure.

This very idea is explained really well in this article:
<http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy>

~~~
chii
and also more recently, by <http://lightmare-studio.com/the-piracy-fallacy/>

------
pronoiac
There's an inaccuracy - Dead Trigger was hit hard by piracy on _Android,_ not
on iOS. I think Lifehacker publicized it after the creator made it free on
Android - "buy it on iOS to show support!"

Edit: I wasn't fully informed. They first made it free on Android, but they
made it free on iOS a week later, giving the same reason. From Daring
Fireball: <http://daringfireball.net/linked/2012/07/23/dead-trigger>

------
brainfed
I thought we were supposed to be outraged at having DRM forced upon us because
developers don't trust us. Now we have to be concerned that "less than five
percent of apps were secured against cracking"?

~~~
saurik
I find the double-standards that people have quite interesting; what was
really striking to me was seeing that it was often the exact same individuals
who would argue against technologies like DRM and laws like SOPA while at the
same time lamenting widespread piracy and demanding effort be put into
stopping it (with explicit descriptions of possible schemes that involve
either DRM or centralized filters very similar to those we would see under
SOPA). When you point out the hypocrisy directly, these people get quite
defensive. :(

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zevyoura
Is there any evidence for the claim in the headline? There's a lot of numbers,
but none that I see that indicate the problem is worsening.

------
ghshephard
Apple needs to figure out how to build a bootloader + OS that isn't so quickly
jailbroken.

~~~
norswap
Playing cat & mouse. Always a smart move.

