"My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"
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Then you move your code to the server and this never bothers you again. This defeats piracy so well it works in China.
I don't want to get all bruce lee, but isn't redirecting some kind of force, be it the interest of pirates or something else, always better than to work against it?
So no... I disagree that it would work. I think rkalla below offers some great advice. To which I'd add that if I were this guy, I'd give a basic version of the app away for free to boost legit downloads through the App store, brand the hell out of it (URL on load page), charge other app websites to be featured as the site of the day, and use various methods ("visit our website for a code to unlock extra content") to get user emails and build a distribution channel that he can leverage in the future. This requires a bit of work, but much less (I think) than is required by the non-freemium approach, and has the advantage of avoiding a focus on Google as one's key distribution channel.
I think what's happening here is that you're not following Patrick's advice to the logical conclusion he's trying to lead you to. He's not suggesting that you SEO an existing iOS application. He's suggesting that you hoist the parts of that application that are worth money into a server and require people to have paid accounts on the server.
This has been Patrick's response to (utterly pointless and exasperating) piracy discussions on HN for at least two years now. He's not being glib. He's repeating himself, concisely.
This comment is not meant to be dismissive, but your advice is imho a recipe for dismal placement in the App store. It makes it much less likely that anyone will find this guy's application and will produce a bunch of 1-star rankings from those who do because "app didn't work" or "requires Internet" or "why do i have to register on server after buying app". Your proposal for server authentication also risks violating Apple's new TOS regarding subscription apps unless he moves to in-app payments and goes freemium anyway (which is part of the more realistic solution).
There is a non-obvious case to be made that this guy's Asteroids clone should be a paid webapp, but the suggestion is so counterintuitive to actual iOS marketers that summarizing all advice to the contrary as "blah blah blah" is not helpful. And I suspect that if you or Patrick had experience developing for iOS you wouldn't be so quick to believe that any strategy that doesn't involve tethering applications is "pointless and exasperating".
Piracy does not help with pagerank, but total downloads do wonders for visibility in the App Store as do the "others also downloaded" buttons. If Patrick is advising killing that marketing channel, he will need to come up with something else and if it isn't SEO I don't know what it is. This guy needs to leverage his freeloaders to promote the visibility of his stuff and be smarter about providing people with opportunities to pay him. For an example of a better approach look at the strategy of this company. Not only does free promote paid, but the price of the paid app is higher because it doesn't need to compete with other paid games for visibility in general channels:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/sillysoft-games/id29253857...
Piracy is great marketing. Better even than free. You have distribution of free accelerated by the impression of value. The best reaction to piracy is to leverage the demand and user base.
Nobody in India uses computers in Indian languages. Everything's in English, and when people do write in an Indian language, it's using a bastardized, improvised romanization. So non-Roman script support is a non-issue.
India has so many languages that all official business is done in English. Since (just like in every other country) computers first appeared in big businesses, only English support was needed. The types of people working at those companies are fluent in English. Most of them went to English-medium schools ever since kindergarten. All of the universities are English-medium, so if you don't learn everything in English from when you're little, you'll never stand a chance in the hypercompetitive university entrance exams.
This made computer adoption very easy - just get some American computers and you're good to go. No time wasted localizing anything. Localization would have been a huge problem in India (a much bigger problem than China) because there are so many languages, and they all have a different script. A veritable nightmare for computer vendors - how many types of keyboards do you have to stock and keep track of? In the cities (where computers appeared first), there would be people from all over the country, speaking and writing all kinds of different languages. There's no one language that everyone knows that you can standardize on.
In China, OTOH, the strong, authoritarian central government made sure that everyone was educated in one language (Mandarin), and even if they weren't, the same script is used by all the languages (since it's character-based, not phonetic-based). This means that all business in China is conducted in Mandarin, and of course, nationalistic fervor wouldn't have allowed computers to simply remain unlocalized. Moreover, the phonetic pinyin input system doesn't require keyboard localization, so the Chinese just use American keyboards as well.
You see a lot of government work has to be done in the vernacular ( by political necessity) - and the defacto tool for written communication happens to be Word. Now, I have been trying to (as part of Accountability Initiative and other egov channels) get the govt to adopt open source alternatives like OpenOffice. But the problem is that complex Indic languages are NOT a priority for either Gnome or KDE (and frankly dont work that well on Linux). For example, the Harfbuzz project mentions somewhere For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType. Graphite is of course, the Indic compatible smartfont technology. Again, I might be completely wrong by way of technology, but the fact remains that the world's fastest growing computing market doesnt have significant linux mindshare. Very sad considering tha it is very very easy to do that in India.. much more than Europe or America, where you have to de-Apple people.
What really, really hurts me though is the fact that a significant (>70%) number of Indian colleges teach programming in Borland C. Why ? well it is easy to blame our cultural proclivity to resist change - but the easier answer is that they dont know any better. Remember, India does not have a significant amount of internet penetration: Network effects happen more due to physical communities rather than electronic ones .
Asia (and especially India) is at the cusp of an open-source revolution just because we cant afford anything else. Come over and start one.
I think you have the wrong attitude with regards to this matter. In an open source project, the priorities are what the developers (or the people paying them) are interested in. If Indians want things to be changed wrt localization support in FLOSS, then they must take the initiative to do it themselves.
Do you think it was easy for the Chinese to get ~50,000 characters into Unicode? It made the font tables absolutely enormous, and so UTF-8 is much more verbose than ASCII. But they knew they wanted Chinese language support, and they did the work to get it.
So if there is sufficient interest from sufficiently influential people, things can be done very easily in open source.
It was simply to illustrate that linux is not yet an alternative to piracy.
Windows and MS Office are software packages that you just use for years and years, probably for a lifetime. Once you're hooked, it's hard to switch. You cannot really compare Windows and MS Office with a game for which you lose interest in 2 weeks. Your business or other endeavors are not really depending on that game.
Also, Microsoft has enough power to lobby local governments to tighten anti-piracy laws and do so in their favor with special emphasis on their products.
Small indie developers can't really compare themselves with Microsoft. Piracy works for you as long as you've got room to convert pirated versions to non-pirated, or to increase the number of paying customers by using piracy for marketing, but again that really depends on the type of product you're selling ... for example, would paying customers gain any advantages, like fresh levels every 2 weeks?
The best thing to do is estimate the number of users and use it in the marketing. (eg. instead of 200 copies sold, say 2000 users, etc)
It's been interesting seeing how your (modest) success has turned you into an asshole - shame really.
I'll happily write up 800 words on why SaaS means piracy vanishes overnight, but the short version is just as informative: pirating the client means you can pirate the service like "pirating" Firefox lets you pirate Basecamp. Do you want me to talk about the China angle and how essentially all games in China (and Korea before it) are currently "free to play" with property/boosts/etc maintained on the server? And how that model is going to become dominant in the US, too, because gamers are voting for it with their wallets?
I see no asshole-ish nature and I'd bet it's 100% on the money, though I've never sold downloadables so I can't speak from experience.
Let's stay above name calling. We're all adults here.
I think patio's advice doesn't help at all in this particular case.
It's been interesting seeing how your (modest) success has turned you into an asshole - shame really.
The result may be a shock for some, but at least they have no more illusions ("So many people love my app but pirate it. If they couldn't pirate it they would buy it!") and can get back to work.
Meaning if you wanted to nurture the piracy (e.g. no DRM, easier install paths, etc.) you would probably get your software in the hands of more people and just redirect what you would have spent on marketing to keeping it in the bank and track the piracy as marketing costs.
I'll admit that is a rosy way to look at it, but I'm definitely one of those "The people that pirate your software, never would have bought it in the first place" believers.
Look at Windows, remember when 95/XP had 96% domination of the world's computers? That only started to come down when they got draconian with their DRM/activation/genuine windows/etc. I saw about half my friends move to Mac/Linux in that move (techie crowd) and I have to imagine they likely moved friends/family to their new platform of choice in the process.
The people that were never going to be their customers went looking elsewhere for alternatives.
Imagine how many of those pirated copies of Windows ran legit copies of Office or IIS (or any Windows-specific software) that were paid for as the result of the machine operating in a Windows-only environment.
Them Microsoft clamped down on those users and squeezed them all out of the eco-system completely. No ancillary sales anymore from those folks; they are now permanent customers of other platforms.
It seems to me that if you can accept that your software will be pirated up-front, you can get some mileage out of it.
Put a mechanism in your game to check for announcements on a web server and display them. Maybe your game is 90% pirated, but when you released your NEXT game (or piece of software) you are suddenly announcing the release to 9x the audience you would have had if it wasn't pirated so heavily.
You suddenly have direct access to all those customers that didn't cost you Google Adwords money or SEO to find. They already like what you do, they pirated your game.
I really see this as an opportunity for this guy (and anyone facing the issue) if you stop thinking about every pirated copy as a lost sale... just like I wouldn't think of every egg I eat in the morning as a chicken I murdered.
They were never your customers and those eggs were never full-grown chickens.
I think that's only true for X% of the people who pirate. Pro-piracy groups like to assume X=100% (that people who pirate would never be persuaded to purchase a copy), anti-piracy groups assume that X=0% (that every pirate can be persuaded to purchase a copy). The truth is that X is probably somewhere in between.
Unfortunately there's no public data about what X really is, or even anything that could narrow down the range a little bit.
X depends a lot on the particular piece of software, the target market, and the context in which it's available. There won't ever be any generalized data.
One interesting test would be to offer an app for a ridiculously low price, like $0.01 and see how many people don't bother to pay even that.
I would put money on sales at $1 not being statistically different from $0.01.
This guys problem? Patience ;) Come on. The game was mass pirated like yesturday? Does he really expect the positive loop back to kick in that fast?
People that pirated it will take time to play it, like it, mention it to someone that might buy it, blog it, show off to friends etc, etc, etc. it takes time. but eventually those 500 pirated copies will translate into some sales.
the question is therefore whether number-of-pirates-that-would-buy-it-if-it-were-not-cracked bigger or less then number-of-sales-that-will-result-from-pirate-marketing ;)
the jury is still out.
A casual game developer dramatically increased their sales by improving the effectiveness of their DRM.
I strongly dislike DRM in games, and will avoid games that push it to far. But it's hard to argue against the sales numbers quoted in the linked article.
A 70% increase in sales should be enough to justify it, no?
Honestly, I think the monetary cost of implementing DRM is vastly overstated.
but.
they say the conversion is 1000 pirates vs. one sale. Which only convinces me that im right. think about it. 999 people less will be using the program. yes, you will sell one more copy, but how many future sales you loos because those 999 people are not going around talking about your program, playing it in public, recommending it to friends...
Their sales rose short term but I think the've lost long term for sure.
The graph at http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9... seems to disagree; the Mac/Linux market share remained constant around 5%/1% respectively. What caused the drop of Windows in the last 2 years from 93% down to 88% seems to be the iOS and Other(Android?) platforms.
Ridiculous.
I think in order to solve the problem, it's important to see and understand all sides of the equation, even the ones we don't agree with.
Most pirates on iOS are simply using one of the free tool and don't go far beyond that. I have implemented a technique for detecting pirated app and used it now in many apps: since then the piracy rate went down to zero which convinced that most pirates on iOS are simply using a tool and don't know what to do if the app they try to crack fail.
I am sure that a true pirate will find way to bypass my security check but so far after more that a year of implementing my solution in all my released app I didn't find anymore pirated copy.
If anyone is interested to learn what can be done, send me an email.
Are you checking that the Mach-O binary is encrypted? I'm not aware of that being worked around by any of the automated tools (and it an approach that is widely discussed).
http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/05/Another-view-of-game-piracy
To quote:
The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated?
The answer is simple -- the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales.
Let's say 100 people own iphones, 10 of which are jailbroken. 9 of the jailbroken phones have downloaded my game, and one of the 90 non-jailbroken phones has paid for it. Maybe, if they couldn't download illegally, none of the 9 would have bought it, meaning I have lost 0% of my sales. Or maybe all 9 would have bought it, meaning I have lost 90% of my sales.
It doesn't matter if only 10% of "potential" customers can download a game illegally, it matters what % of likely customers do it. And for some developers that will be much higher than average, for others it will be much lower.
Also worth noting is that he talks about the disproportionate number of games pirated to games sold across the board. What can you take from that? That pirates are far more likely to pirate a larger number of games than customers will buy.
That's hard to prove, but if there are really that many more pirates in so many games, it certainly makes sense.
What is more interesting is that I noticed a dramatic drop in sales when it started to be distributed on the pirate websites. I'm not quite sure what to make of that, but it does give some indication that piracy did affect me.
For what it is worth, my app appeals to the geek crowd. From the data I have been able to acquire, I would say the majority of my users, including legitimate ones, are running jailbroken devices. That may help skew the piracy rates towards the higher end.
Ultimately, I'm not worried about it. I wasn't banking my livelihood on the success of the app. It has made enough money to recoup my time investment, which is an added bonus. I do feel for the users who did pay for my app, however. I do feel that piracy has prevented me from spending more time making the product better for them. That is the real unfortunate side.
In other words, 90% of his 'customer base' is people who wanted to try it for free, or didn't find it worth paying for, or wouldn't pay for it anyhow.
It's a red herring. It's making him think more people want his app than really do... At least, at the price he's asking.
Quick story: A friend of mine, Carl Lydon, created www.chamberofchat.com, which is an 3D chat-room for Harry Potter Fans that became popular in the early 2000s. This chat-room was promptly infiltrated by a nefarious hacker who assigned himself moderator status and began spewing filth, casting elimination spells, and harassing innocent chatters. At first Carl freaked out but got a hold of himself and re-built a few key modules of his multiplayer log-in code. By the end, the hacker went away, and Carl learned more about security than he ever could have from any one else. A gold-mine of lessons. A fine-art school graduate, he now makes a fortune programming multiplayer online games. Piracy is a gift.
(edit formatting)
I don't do iphone apps, but I was under the impression Apple controlled the distribution?
I don't know the details of what you do to crack an .ipa (maybe they're not cracked and are just copied from a legitimate purchase?), but I know if you install something that blocks the iPhone's checks, you can install anything through iTunes.
I didn't even know it was possible and I did iOS development. Then I saw someone do it and had a WTF moment. He just said that's how everyone he knows 'shares' apps. One guy gets it, and downloads it on everyone else's phone.
For example, my spouse and I could use the same purchased apps (if we used the same stuff) since we share a single iTunes account and library. I could not sync with my next door neighbor and use all their apps at the same time as I use my own.
I'm talking about this set of steps (on an iPhone/iPad):
1) Go to Settings App
2) Log out of iTunes
3) Log in as Person B
4) Launch App Store
5) Download an app that Person B previously bought. This is a free update.
6) Go to Settings
7) Sign out of Person B's iTunes account
8) Log back in as myself
9) Voila! Launch pirated app which is still on my device without having to jailbreak my phone.
This of course doesn't allow me to update the app because it requires I login as the other person. And yeah, I probably can't sync this rogue app to my computer. But for games and most apps, this is enough. If an app is worth pirating it's probably good enough without the updates. And I turn off app sync because it's annoying. If I really lost my apps I'd just reinstall the ones that mattered.
NB: I don't do this myself. I'm sure if there was a more 'secure' way without being horrible Apple would have done it. Getting apps onto a device for development was/is horrific.
Compare this to pirating an .ipa file via bittorrent for jailbroken iphone users, and it's a different story.
Perhaps you need to give more away and make it easier and then you'll sell more?
Yeah, I guess you could dedicate tends of thousands of dollars to 'combat piracy' or some such nonsense. But time an time again as indie creators find out, you treat them kindly but otherwise ignore them.
Of course, that you're on Reddit and HN, you have breached the first barrier: obscurity. If I had an iDevice, I'd try it out.
With all the talks about the benefits of the Apple Store, I just found this story interesting. Before, I thought that jailbraking was a niche practice and that the iPhone/iPad were relatively spared from piracy.
I was one of the idiots that brought a legal copy of Dragon Age 2. Only to be locked out of my account (and game) for a 1/2 week due to the DRM.
One question on my mind is whether the stats are legit. If it's not some quirk in Apple's reporting system, maybe someone is maliciously hitting the link to the 'site of the day'. Wonder what the logs for that webserver look like - is every user agent an iOS device as expected?
I haven't spent much time digging into the iOS app pirating community, but my expectation is that users are less likely to pirate if there's a free version of the app. What exactly does prompt someone to crack a 99c app and make it available to other users? Why would someone go through the trouble to get it that way when it's so cheap?
And everything is pirated. I once had a friend of mine hand me a pirated copy of the PDR (the Physicians Desk Reference on CD). I still have it.. though it's out of date by now.