App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million

An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.

Comments

Re:How does it work?

[billcopc]

You hit the nail right on the head. How many times have I looked at an App's description, then turned away because I was "on the fence" ? What I would love is a 48 hour refund window. Buy the app, try it out, and if it is absolute shite (like most are), get your $2.99 back. You might be saying "three bucks is nothing", and you're right, but I am quite vehemently opposed to giving those three bucks to some asshat who can deliver a great writeup for a shitty app. The store ratings are also useless, because it's a well known fact that 99% of users are clueless idiots, so unless I am a also a clueless idiot, those ratings won't apply to me.

Prime example: RDP and VNC clients. There's about a dozen or so out there, and I've tried them all. All but one of them suck ass, whether it's sluggish performance, lack of configurability, or in one case I was expected to register all my usernames and passwords to a 3rd party so the app could sign in to their web service, just to give me back my logins. They also don't come cheap, $9.99 up to $24.99 for some of these stinkers. Am I really expected to spend $100 trying all these things, just to settle on the one that is indeed everything I want it to be ? Is it fair to the one good app, that all the others got paid anyway ? I think not. That one great developer deserves compensation and praise, the other 10 deserve a kick in the nuts and a chargeback fee.