Apple App Store Has Lost $450 Million To Piracy

24/7 Wall Street ^ | January 13, 2010 at 8:39 am | Garrett W. McIntyre with Phil MacDonald

[PA Engineer]

These numbers were either pulled out of their noses or made up on the spot.

I disagree. I think it was somewhere much darker and all of the way to the elbow.

[Swordmaker]

I've always considered those using pirated software are likely doing the vendor a favor. They likely wouldn't be using the software if it had to be purchased, and they are increasing market share for the product.

Tell that to a buddy of mine who created the number one most popular classroom management package back in the 1970s. After the pirates got done with it, he had a market share of over 95% in classrooms around the US... but sold fewer than 100 copies... after investing tens of thousands of dollars. School districts, teachers, even states would buy a copy and hand out copies to friends, schools, ignoring his license, like candy to friends, colleagues, it was even publish as "free software" by Teacher's Unions who removed his copyright notices. He got market share and went bankrupt. Some favor. He never wrote a line of code again.

[Swordmaker]

I disagree. I think it was somewhere much darker and all of the way to the elbow.

I agree... but I think they used the upper access route to get it... just takes a little more work...

[antiRepublicrat]

Taking their numbers as true, that’s 5% not paid for. Not bad at all.

[Swordmaker]

Taking their numbers as true, that’s 5% not paid for. Not bad at all.

The vast majority of the 3 billion downloads are FREE apps... these bozos are claiming that for every single paid app downloaded 3 more of the paid apps are pirated... leading to their $450 million loss figure. It's bogus.

Since pirate apps will only work on jail-broken iPhones, then each jail-groken iPhone would have to have more than $112 worth of pirated apps on it to account for all this piracy assuming an exaggerated 4 million jail-broken iPhones (which is the total number of all contacts to the jail-break app store, Cydia, since it opened its virtual doors).

[The Truth Will Make You Free]

Valid point. In the example you gave schools could clearly pay for the product they pirated. And in most case individuals could probably pay for pirated software as well.

Here's an interesting observation regarding UNDP, the United Nations Development Program. They promote the use of free and open source software (FOSS) for developing nations. And it is true that FOSS does have some value. But internally, the standard for UNDP is Microsoft Windows and MS Office, as they recognize it as an international standard used by their high paid international consultants. So, in essense they are promoting at worst "digitial divide" where thrid world developing nations will be at a lower non-standard digital capability than the rest of the world, or at best FOSS as a stepping stone to the software commonly used in the modern world.

[steve-b]

These numbers were either pulled out of their noses

I was thinking of a different orifice.

[TheBattman]

The numbers in this “article” just don’t add up. First is your correct assessment of app prices. I suspect that the supposed “average” weighs the relatively small handful of high$ apps much more than the massive library of free and $.99 apps.

The most expensive app I have was like $4.99.

I know a whole bunch of iPhone owners. I know zero who have a “jailbroken” iphone. I once considered going through the process (still not as simple as the article would imply), then became aware of the major issues many jailbroken iphones experience when new software comes out.