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Android Software Piracy Rampant
bednarz writes "Pirating Android apps is a longstanding problem. But it seems to be getting worse, even as Google begins to respond much more aggressively. The dilemma: protecting developers' investments, and revenue stream, while keeping an open platform. Some have argued that piracy is rampant in those countries where the online Android Market is not yet available. But a recent KeyesLabs research project suggests that may not be true: 'Over the course of 90 days, the [KeyesLabs] app was installed a total of 8,659 times. Of those installations only 2,831 were legitimate purchases, representing an overall piracy rate of over 67%.... The largest contributor to piracy, by far, is the United States providing 4,054 or about 70% of all pirated installations...'"
Do they mention the price of the app, what the app did, where they phones in the US with US numbers, where they foreign phones in the US, did they see how long the users leaved the app installed after they pirated, did any of the pirates later purchase the app, how long they did the study, or anything else that might actually be useful information?
GENERATION 25: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation. Social exper
If you own a jewelry store, it will be robbed. the very act of owning a jewelry store is tacit acknowledgment that you accept being robbed. companies that sell jewelry should accept this and consider alternative income methods like polishing jewelry or beet farming.
as long as jewelry stores think that their jewelry has monetary worth, they will continue to fight a losing battle to gun technology itself.
/ in other words, you are an idiot.
Android Market apps are mostly super cheap. Who can't afford $1 on a game they'll play for a few days non-stop? Or a few bucks on a ROM management app? Prices for most paid apps are so low that I imagine that the largest barrier to entry is not price, but the effort required to set up one or more credit cards. My hypothesis, for that reason, is that a large portion of the piracy comes from the age 15-20 crowd who have fancy phones and lots of free time to figure out piracy options, but no credit card(s).
Google can greatly reduce this kind of piracy by working out pricing deals with the carriers to allow charges to appear on phone bills. How else would the ringtone industry thrive as it has? Verizon certainly doesn't offer a direct-bill Android Market option. Maybe this is already the case on other carriers? How does piracy compare in those cases?
Another annoyance of the Market is currency conversion. I've bought apps for sale in both Yen and Euros, and for those purchases I had to set up a Visa card since my AMEX didn't support foreign purchases (on the Market, at least). Most users don't want to deal with that kind of crap ... again, piracy is easier. Can't Google Checkout handle currency conversion on the developer's end without hassling end-users?
I read the article and still have no idea how piracy rate is determined. Over at Keyslabs there is a writeup which covers licensing, but nothing showing how pirates are detected. Maybe it's to prevent the pirates from getting smart, but being closed about your statistics is worse than having no statistics at all. We have no way of validating the numbers against false positives so to counter I have embedded a script in this post which detects theft and have found that 95% of the people who read this are plagiarizing it for their own posts. There now we can all have statistics.
Otherwise, expect us to live our lives by any means necessary.
In what way is pirating an app necessary to living your life?
I remember reading a blog post by 2D Boy, makers of World of Goo, that stated that they calculated a piracy rate of 90%. That's on an independent game, that only cost $15. It's a great game, and well worth the money. There's also absolutely no DRM on the game so there's no reason to assume that people are "pirating" because they need to get around copy protection for a game they already bought. They added corrections to the blog post, later, correcting the number to around 82%. So 67% doesn't seem all that bad in comparison.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Thank you for your advice. Since I don't believe I can interest you in a support contract for my jump and run game, I'm going to plaster it with ads as an alternative source of income.
Piracy rate is meaningless. You can have a 0% piracy rate easily, just don't release your app. The only thing that matters is revenue. You're better off having 1000 paying customers and 1,000,000,000 pirates than you are having 100 customers and no pirates at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
But software is infinitely reproducible for next to no cost
Too bad it's not "infinitely developable" for next to no cost.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
One word: Permissions. There's a reason they're displayed every time you install an app...
I find it difficult to believe that anyone has even stolen code from you...perhaps you mean copied? Lets be perfectly clear, so-called "piracy" is not stealing anything, it's violating a (theoretically) temporary monopoly that you've been granted by the government. Aside from that monopoly, you have absolutely nothing to do with two people copying data between their computers. You can argue that copyright protection is a necessary incentive to produce creative works in our society, but I don't believe---and a great many others agree with me---that those protections should extend to private copying in the digital era, and that stance does not make us "morally corrupt."
Consider this. I don't use proprietary software. I'll gladly pay for software, but not so long as the author is going to restrict what I'm allowed to do with it. So whatever software you may produce, am I not "stealing" just as much money from you by not using it as those who share it amongst themselves are by not paying you for it? Or are only some of the people who choose not to pay for your software "thieves," despite the fact that we all have exactly the same net effect on your pocketbook?
You made an informative comment about Russia? That's not the way we do things around here
Which means that it is the way they do things in Soviet Russia, proving that his post is authentic.
They probably have some part of their game that connects to a server to post scores, or some code that phones home. But most likely its a score posting and during that connection they get a unique ID for that phone so you can over write your best score. But if 8,659 people send in scores, but only 2,831 purchases were made, they can determine that most likely there is a 67% piracy rate for their application. So, its a guess, but a very educated guess, and could actually be said to be the lowest their app is being pirated, in that it could be higher amount of people having it installed but are not phoning home.
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Not every pirated copy is a lost sale. I can't stress that enough.
What about the ones that are lost sales though? Should they be ignored? What about the ethics of it? Should people enjoy the fruits of your labour for free when you've made it clear that you want to be paid for them?
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
However, this also ignores the simple fact that most of the people who pirated an app wouldn't have shelled out money for it.
If they weren't willing to pay for it, why should they get to enjoy/use it?
Right.
The permissions listings are about as opaque as they come. I've some experience with the soft white underbelly of technology, so I can make a good guess about what a particular permission entails and why it might be necessary, but I still can't quite figure whether an app is actually secure or not. And for many apps the list is quite long - not exactly user friendly or convenient. If I (after 20+ years of experience with computer technology) can barely make heads nor tails of the permissions, heaven help the butcher/backer/candlestickmaker who just wants to feels safe when installing an app on their phone. And I have the SDK installed and can actually read the details.
In a word, the permissions listings tell a person fuck-all about whether an app is actually safe or not. With a few exceptions. Apps that require no special permissions or just a very few, rare though they are, give one some sense of confidence. Internet connection required for a stock ticker app? Ok, can't be much harm in that. I'll install. Beyond that, as the list of required permissions grow, the difficulty in evaluating the safety of an app grows exponentially. Access to SD storage, personal contacts list, state of phone, location, yada yada. Most apps seem to require most of these. Access to SD storage is needed for reading/writing personal settings, caching data and the like. Fine. But is access to other data on the SD card limited? I have no clue. As far as I can tell, once an app has access the SD card, a full wipe is possible. There is little information to suggest otherwise.
So basically, for apps that require a non-trivial list of permissions to function, one is left with trust in the developer as the only security. The rest is a roll of the dice.
To be honest, I think most people treat the list of permissions much as they treat an EULA: a list of incomprehensible gibberish that one must ignore to get to the actual goal (an installed app, in this case). It's in the Google market, so it must be safe, right? Click, click, install.
Android app permissions as a way to assess the safety of an app? You've got to be kidding. Epic fail.
Thing is, you already mentioned why it's not as big of a deal on the iPhone... jailbreaking isn't something you see a whole lot of (tech media notwithstanding).
Most folks either don't know how to jailbreak an iPhone, or don't want to risk bricking the thing (and therefore blowing the $$$ they have tied up in phone and contract). Sure - you and I know it's fairly easy and safe to do, but Joe PhoneUser doesn't know that, and they have actual money tied up in the beastie before they even get it out of the box it came in.
Given this, the majority will buy the apps from the store. Now if jailbreaking were uber-common, then yeah - pirating apps would be just as common. Otherwise, overall? It's pretty self-evident that piracy is going to be an Android (and WinMo, and Symbian) thing.
From a developer's POV, yeah - the piracy rate w/ iPhones is going to be a lot lower, and therefore more lucrative for the dev. OTOH, the dev will miss out on folks trying the product out, and on any of the marketing bennies that piracy can give his products.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Case in point - way back in the DOS days, a friend insisted I try simcity. I though the game concept was silly, but gave it a whirl. I went on to buy Simcity 2000, Simcity 3000 Deluxe, Simcity 4 + Rush hour, and Simcity for the Wii. I also bought a few other maxis games, all stemming from that one floppy.
However, if I had had to buy the original game first, none of those sales would have happened. Not one.
Some of us *do* want to reward publishers who produce good stuff - we just don't want to get sucked in by nice artwork and a bogus description that turns into an almost-immediate lunchbag letdown.
What? You're on slashdot, and don't understand that software can become necessary, and that some people might not be able to afford it? Here's a tip: you're in the information age, and this need is exactly why a lot of us donate software to the free software community.
While I agree with you that there is definitely good reasons for FOSS, and I am extremely appreciate of efforts of the FOSS community - we're not talking about the same problem. If you are already sporting an Android phone (where the phone costs ~$200 and the price per month is ~$70 - $120), you can afford a $1.00 app. It's not even close to the same situation.
However, this also ignores the simple fact that most of the people who pirated an app wouldn't have shelled out money for it.
I'm actually not convinced of that when you start taking micropayments into account.
Sure, for a game that costs $15, a user who pirates it might be doing it to save some money, and with the pirated copy unavailable, would simply have not bought it. But when you're talking a couple bucks, I find it *far* less credible that users are turning to piracy because they can't afford the purchase, or don't see the product as having sufficient value to justify the price.
Are you going to buy something if you can't at least kick the tires first?
Eh, as has been pointed out many times, the android marketplace has a 24-hour refund period. Combine that with user reviews, and I'm sorry, the try-before-you-buy justification for piracy just doesn't hold water.
And let's be honest - a lot of these utilities should eventually make their way into the OS anyway.
Oh, well, then that totally justifies piracy... ::rollseyes::