iCombat Developer Analyses iPhone App Piracy

The developer of the iCombat game for iPhones has posted online to share his experiences and conclusions about App Store piracy.

In an effort to track piracy the iCombat developer chose to detect when his game was cracked and then have a pop-up screen say something inoffensive along with a button routing them away from game play after 5 levels. The button redirected the pirate to a hidden page called “You Jacked My App” where the text read:

“Hi if you have been directed to this page it’s because we see that you have a pirated copy. While we are glad you are interested please understand that we want to continue making it better, but to do that we need people to each pay for their copy. If you want to continue using please purchase today.”


After analysis of the data it was found that:
1) Pirates are extremely early adopters:
2) There is no feedback culture among app pirates
3) The overall pirate community is smaller than expected, but much more active

After looking at the data the developer concluded that:
1) Piracy is still not that big of a problem when talking about the apps with larger download volumes
2) Blocking pirates is not worth it unless you can push conversion by giving them a lite style version
3) Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face


Read More [via Gizmodo]