We've done everything in the client for privacy and reliability, but the obvious countermeasure would be to move functionality over to a backend. This would be history echoing the transition from boxed software to SaaS.
So really what you're saying in this comment is that you've written your backend APIs with the assumption that the only user is a benevolent app which you wrote. If it's possible for somebody to take your app and tweak it to circumvent your subscription's restrictions, then what prevents a person from hooking up their phone to a development HTTPS proxy, intercepting the API requests, and making their own cracked client without side-loading at all?
Side-loading is NOT a problem for subscription apps done properly, and it's NOT a problem for privacy or security, so long as the side-loading implementation is done responsibly.
SSL pinning, essentially.
Totally true about Android--it's the smaller platform for us, but the fact we have not seen piracy there yet gives me hope.
To be clear I am in favor of sideloading, and we would benefit from it in several ways.
There are great pirate movie websites where you can watch all the movies at about the same user experience or even better but Netflix etc are doing just fine.
Piracy isn’t what it used to be but I do enjoy these sites.
The real problem is the subscription fatigue and fragmentation. I won’t subscribe to all the services and Even if I have a subscription it’s easier for me to find the movies in one place.
However apps are different, you are expected to open different apps for different things anyway. In apps, the danger could be something like ChatGPT becoming the main UI and doing everything the user wants from there.
That's not been my experience. Every time a crack appeared for my software sales went down. Every time I strengthened the licensing software sales went up. This is for B2B software, god knows what it is like if you sell to consumers.
In B2C, generally, convenience is the king.
> It has to be noted that the research was carried out as part of Carnegie Mellon University’s Initiative for Digital Entertainment Analytics (IDEA), which received a generous donation from the MPAA.
https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-block-doesnt-boost-sales...
If there's no legal option where your customers can pay you, that sure can lead to a revenue drop.
The music industries have been very slow to adapt to the internet and it has cost them some revenue, I'll give you that but that has nothing to do with piracy.
But you think that all stopped as soon as there was a legal option? Do you really think there are no people out there who can afford it but chose to pirate anyway?
I don't know why people find it so hard to believe other than they are trying to justify their own activity. Do you think the media industry spent all this money on anti-piracy activities just for the fun of it?
Yes it did https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/ , that's exactly what happened.
As soon as they added a way to receive money, customers paid, it's visible on the graph.
If customers can't pay you, of course you are going to lose money.
> I don't know why people find it so hard to believe other than they are trying to justify their own activity. Do you think the media industry spent all this money on anti-piracy activities just for the fun of it?
It has more to do about content control than money. Guess who benefits the most of stricter copyright rules? The RIAA, MPAA and similar organisations, it's a conflict of interest. Being harsh on piracy is easier to sell than just "give us more power because we deserve it"
Some customers paid. What I'm saying is there are a significant number who could pay but won't and the harder you make the piracy the smaller that number will be.
And music piracy isn't any harder than 10 years ago, it's using the exact same tech.
The only thing that changed is that now there's a way to pay for music legally online, which wasn't the case before.
The lesson to learn for the music industries here based on data is that customers will pay if there's realistic service they can pay for, if they don't have a way to pay for music, they won't get any money. That sounds obvious but now we have the figures associated showing that.