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Applications 297 days ago | | 5 Comments

How real is Android piracy? Two big-time devs report positive numbers

AA Pirate2

After a week where Android piracy has been a hot topic we have a bright light for all you developers. Users, developers and enthusiasts from all around have been talking about the lack of downloads and that piracy is just incredibly high. Madfinger, the developers of Dead Trigger, were forced to push the game down to $0.99 only to later make it completely free.

However, we have had two pieces of news come in today that are really quite comforting. The first is that Instapaper (which somewhat recently came to Android) has been enjoying a dramatically improved download rate. That is, an increase of 600 percent! This has been ever since the release of the ASUS/Google Nexus 7. Those are whopping numbers for the app and shows that Android users are still downloading apps. Don’t fear too much just yet developers!

Second up, Google’s Jack Palevich has quoted Chris Pruett’s (the developer of Windup Knight) tweet on Google+.

 

Chris takes those words and evaluates them with all his Google/MIT knowledge at hand -

I think piracy is, as always, a red herring. You can’t stop it, but as long as it’s slightly arduous, it’s not a lot of lost sales. Because a huge number of people who pirate software would never buy it in a million years. You aren’t losing a sale to them. Piracy starts to matter only when pirate users can cost you money in other ways, e.g. network bandwidth and server cost. Yet another reason to be a free app in today’s mobile marketplace.

Interesting take on the matter. Chris seems to dismiss piracy as being an issue – as long as the developer is doing the right thing that is. But what is that right thing? Well, in Chris’ eyes it appears to be that making your app free in today’s mobile marketplace is the answer to these issues.

I, for one, am not against paid apps. In fact, I applaud them just as I do paid music, paid movies and all media content. Apps should not be different. The only thing that I do ask is that every paid app has a free version (ad supported, of course) to let the user gauge whether they are willing to dish out a small fee to play the full/premium version. That doesn’t sound too hard does it?

So, how real is the Android piracy epidemic? Is the ‘issue’ on such a big scale as we have all been led to believe over the last couple weeks? For now, we don’t know. But if these positive numbers are anything to go by then it seems that ‘real’ Android downloads still gave  life.

Source: The Verge

Written by : Josh is the founder of Android Australia. He is an adamant vegan, tech enthusiast and psychology student. He is currently a Google Chromebook Product Specialist and a Student Ambassador. You should probably follow him at +Josh on Twitter or on his personal blog!
  • George Constantinopolous

    I believe in digital freedom. Similarly with music, the way in which we interact online and discover new things is by getting them for free. There would be no way to discover and truly enjoy an app for everybody unless it is free. With the ability of dev’s to have simple advertising on their app in order to create revenue – I think there is greater earning potential for free apps than paid apps.

  • Cam Charles

    this is great news and proves there 2 sides to every story.

    imo opinion there are two big things that can be done to stem piracy, of apps that “paid for up front” is the only possible revenue stream.

    the first is the devs doing and that is make a trial/free version, its less of an issue now but back in that day (2.0/2.1/2.2) days it wasn’t always clear if an app would actually work on your device, these days this isnt really an issue the SDK has ben fine tuned to the point apps generally work android wide, but even so its always good to trial an app and see if it suits you first and we all know the 15min refund window doesnt allow that.

    the second is googles issue and that is payment methods, dont have a credit card then badluck no apps for you, appla have proven that opening up the payment methods is nothing but win, so what gives google? this can be extended to actually having the play store globally available…

    the extended post by chris on google+ goes on to say that “close to 100% of our pirate users are in China . Those users can’t buy things on Android anyway.” i think that says alot

  • https://play.google.com/store/apps/developer?id=Tomas+Hubalek Tomas Hubalek

    Hi,

    I’m developer of apps with millions of downloads (Gauge Battery Widget, Make Your Clock, Battery Widget? Reborn!) and I have couple of comments regarding piracy:

    1) I spent some time with investigation of piracy ratio on my apps. I found following: it is extremely difficult to measure it properly. Pirates have very good tools to hide that app was cracked and these tools are almost unbreakable (details I can share by email). Another issue is Big Chinese Firewall that also filters out some reports.

    So if somebody says that he/she has 12% on Android and 15% on iOS then I would like to see methodology as it is most probably wrong if not done properly.

    2) Regarding numbers: Gauge Battery Widget Pro (paid version) is most actively used in China (where I never sold a copy) followed by USA (almost the same amount of active usages) and then other countries. These numbers come from Flurry reports.

    3) Pirated copies brings additional costs because cracked app is sometimes cracked incorrectly and you are getting bug reports of bugs that are not from your code but from pirate’s code.

    4) Pirated copies are full of malware and help PR activities of Android’s competitors.

    • http://androidaustralia.com.au Josh Berg

      Tomas, that’s really interesting to hear your side of it. I have no idea how they got their stats on piracy, but it sounds like it’s incredibly hard to ever really know.

      As I made clear in the article, I’m not a fan of piracy. I didn’t really think of the increased malware and bugs, but it definitely makes sense – another negative of the whole industry.

      P.S. I love your apps and I know other members of the team do too.

    • Cam Charles

      when the story about dead trigger came out i wondered rhe exact same thing, unless youve got some sort of internet based drm or reporting system in your app, that doesnt get disabled when pirated, theres really not any way to know for sure, im glad youve mentioned it.

      ive never thought about the bug reports for pirated code before either thats a really good point