People were stealing a $0.99 app? Holy shit! What pathetic losers. I going to have my kid buy it when he comes home. Sounds like a great game for his little brother.
As the article mentions (and as I've heard from some other developers), pirates are generally the among the first people to buy any app -- they pirate everything, regardless of price.
...It's a pity that Apple probably wouldn't let you submit thousands of applications, as you could make a fair amount of money off of the pirates before anyone noticed.
Did we read the same article? I read that he has a ZERO PERCENT conversion rate for pirates. They're "adopting" the title, but they aren't paying for it.
He's talking about the very first sale. His idea of doing a financial DOS on the pirates by releasing thousands of apps intrigues me.
It is mildly surprising to me that Apple hasn't stepped up to help with some form of watermarking embedded in the app, so you could tell who had made the first purchase...
As far as I know, there are no limitations to how many applications you can submit to the app store, but getting them all through the approval process is another thing.
There's a 1:1 steady state ratio of pirated users to pay users for his title. There are, what, 10 people who actually cracked the title? For crackers, it's not about the money. But he has a 0% (ZERO PERCENT) conversion rate for pirate users. For deadbeats, it's clearly about the money.
As a developer, I really don't mind the pirates, as long as theirs is a marginal activitiy. Most of them would probably never pay for the apps they download anyway, so they don't make a significant difference in my sales. In fact, they kind of act like reviewers and may help popularize good apps.
Good thing to keep it illegal, tho, or else it wouldn't be a marginal activity anymore.
My first job was at a chain music store where I became familiar with the term "shrink". I noticed that the most-often-stolen item was cassette singles, which made sense given their target audience. What didn't make sense to me was that they were placed near the entrance/exit, which seemed to make them even more vulnerable.
When I asked the manager why this was, she explained "the margin on those tapes is lower than almost anything else in the store".
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 22.3 ms ] thread...It's a pity that Apple probably wouldn't let you submit thousands of applications, as you could make a fair amount of money off of the pirates before anyone noticed.
[Ick, he's right, I misread the comment. Sorry.]
It is mildly surprising to me that Apple hasn't stepped up to help with some form of watermarking embedded in the app, so you could tell who had made the first purchase...
Compare: (downloaded from appulous to make a point :P) http://img.skitch.com/20090508-amctwf48bn1ng7mhexbsjbtdg.jpg
with (purchased) http://img.skitch.com/20090508-xt1m8rqwrm96wedr8rn9s5mie6.jp...
Good thing to keep it illegal, tho, or else it wouldn't be a marginal activity anymore.
My first job was at a chain music store where I became familiar with the term "shrink". I noticed that the most-often-stolen item was cassette singles, which made sense given their target audience. What didn't make sense to me was that they were placed near the entrance/exit, which seemed to make them even more vulnerable.
When I asked the manager why this was, she explained "the margin on those tapes is lower than almost anything else in the store".
Brilliant.