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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.
Look at the bigger picture. There are hundreds of thousands upon millions of smartphone users out there who want applications for their phones.
Who is next to set up a viable store? Microsoft? Google? A carrier?
Piracy is a minor problem. Monetizing users is the major problem. Can you interest users into buying your phone? What sales model can you use to get them to part with their money?
Who cares about Apple? They are just another player.
Looking around I have yet to see a single friend of mine with pirated apps. I'm just saying.