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Mar 31, 09 - 09:00 am Comment from: Ottawa Mark

What's actually ironic is that it's often easier to install and run a bootleg app on a Mac than it is in Windows...not that I ever do it myself...ever...

Mar 31, 09 - 09:01 am Comment from: Ampar

ARGHHHH

at MDN Take

Where is the evidence that Mac users steal less than Windows users?

Mar 31, 09 - 09:12 am Comment from: emanon

@ MDN Take...

Are you trying to say in a roundabout way that the people that are stealing iPhone apps are Windows users?

Seems a good number of people have taken their cue from Congress. Just like in government, crime appears to be on the rise.

Mar 31, 09 - 09:15 am Comment from: Big Als MBP

@ BlackMac,

While you Windows users hardly ever interface with Mac users, Mac users know many, many Windows users.

We know how Windows users get their software.

We also know Microsoft's stats. They're complaining that 20 to 25% of all Windows installations in the world are pirated.

Most pirated Mac installations are on old Windows computers.

This would be the same MDN that casually drops in the word 'Bittorrent' when talking about the greed of the Hollywood studios - naughty!

Mind you, I can't talk. You'd be lucky if you could find one legal piece of software on my Mac.

Hmmm. Perhaps I shouldn't have disclosed that little nugget on a site that records IP addresses.

Look, that crack about Bittorrent - only joking. I didn't really mean it, heh.

As a developer with six games on the store, I can tell you that the percentage of available cracked apps is much, much higher than 20%.

After finding my own games cracked, I started to track down the places they are being passed around and found, in an admittedly informal sampling, nearly 100% of apps cracked. Games, productivity, etc. If it's a paid app, you can find a cracked version easily.

Thankfully, they are all cracked the exact same way and the few simple lines of code a developer needs to add to their program to detect a cracked version is both fully transparent to legitimate versions and 100% effective detecting the cracked versions. At that point, there are lots of things developers can do ... most developers will up a very polite alert stating it's cracked and suggest a user either quit or buy the app. Other send a device UUID back first, run in demo mode, etc.

It's bad that we have to do this for a $2.99 app, but that's the real world.

Mar 31, 09 - 09:37 am Comment from: eMax

Too bad the penalty for this isnt death... i bet less people would do it.

Mar 31, 09 - 09:50 am Comment from: HMCIV

@eMax

The penalty is worse than death. I will KILL your World of Warcraft Character.

(Thank you South Park)

Mar 31, 09 - 09:50 am Comment from: ElderNorm

Perhaps someone could explain. How does one install a "cracked app"? Do you need a cracked iPhone to do this?

Its confusing to me since what few apps I have are free or really cheap and just not worth the time and effort of working around. :-(

en

...Just like in government, crime appears to be on the rise.

The government is owned and operated by private enterprise... the real criminals are acting on self interest to the exclusion of public good.

Mar 31, 09 - 09:51 am Comment from: Sir Gill Bates

"Are we calling Windows sufferers "cheap?" Yes. It's one of the few things on which we agree with Microsoft."

Many of them aren't necessarily cheap. They are simply lacking in any sense of decency, integrity, or moral values.

Mar 31, 09 - 09:53 am Comment from: MrScrith

@MDN take

Right... and what was that Trojan/virus thing we were hearing about on cracked copies of iWork09? Why was it such a problem again?

Don't forget, we've got a lot of Windows "switchers" who now own Macs, but still have that Windows-user "cheap" mentality.

To warp an old saying, you can take the user out of Windows, but you can't always take Windows out of the user...

@MDN take:

That's a pretty far stretch, MDN. Pirates go after things which they can get easily and sell to someone else conveniently. So the reason approx. 5,000 apps have been pirated is due to the popularity of the iPhone, the willingness of people to buy/download products from other sources to avoid paying for them (or at least pay less), and the ease at which the software can be pirated.

Could this be due to the mentality built up by some Windows users (and pirates)? Possibly. If Microsoft had made its products cheaper (and other developers as well), there would be far less of a market for piracy. However, that's a business decision each company has to make.

Let's hope iPhone OS 3.0 makes it more difficult to pirate software.

Mar 31, 09 - 10:36 am Comment from: Predrag

..."Apple's App Store offers about 25,000 paid apps"

I thought about 25,000 was the TOTAL number of apps out there, paid or free, and less than half of those are paid. This would make the percentage of cracked apps somewhere above 50% mark, if their other numbers are correct, which is now a bit doubtful.

Still, it is sad. Apparently, developers will have to make some additional efforts to break these pirated copies if they want fewer people to steal their software.

As for Windows, the correct numbers are close to 22% in US, about 35% globally are pirated copies of XP. Other software is often higher, MS office probably having the highest piracy rates, on the account of lot of PCs being sold with pre-installed legitimate, OEM copy of XP, and Office being the first package anyone would install after the OS.

Mar 31, 09 - 10:45 am Comment from: John E

it's gotta be teenagers and geeks in their 20's mainly. just like most music file sharing. and cracked games. that's not the iPhone's main market, but somewhat more likely for the Touch. so the impact will be limited.

adults steal more expensive stuff instead - pricey software, and of course DVD's. and the third world runs on pirate software.

Supports MDNs take. Not the first company.

http://www.prosoniq.com/news/win-disctd/

MW Pattern. First apogee, now prosoniq, one seems to be emerging here.

Mar 31, 09 - 11:04 am Comment from: Predrag

I don't think Apogee and Prosoniq did it for the same reasons. While Prosoniq is a software company and Windows piracy accounted for vast majority of their Windows market share (essentially making revenue from their Windows version practically non-existent), Apogee makes audio hardware, and for them, this was exactly a decision based on current market share, and a bit of a gamble at that. One could try and argue that since there aren't sub- $1,000 Macs, the recession might halt, even reverse, OS X's market share growth, and some hope Windows 7 would fix the Vista fiasco, so there is a possibility that the decision to drop Windows development might be a gamble.

Of course, us Mac users know better; recession won't last forever, and most people (Lauren's "true story" notwithstanding) have some brain.

All in all, let's hope this DOES become a trend.

Sounds like the creators of the site "The Monkey Ball" are real whinners - oops I meant "winners". Total, accidental slip. From the article:

There are also websites hosting dozens of pirated iPhone apps, such as Appulo.us, which currently offers about 3,200 cracked apps. Another site, The Monkeys Ball, recently relaunched with 81 cracked apps. The Monkeys Ball promotes the cracked apps as "trial" downloads, encouraging users to buy the apps after they've tried them.

"We want people to think of these as trial apps since Apple doesn't allow trials of apps before purchase," said "Omar," one of the creators of the site, who refused to disclose his real name to Wired.com. <b>"It's Apple's fault for not putting up a trials system."</b?

Whaa... Whaa... Whaa... I don't take any responsibility it's all Apple's fault. Even though I helped create a web site that supports an illegal activity, I did it because Apple forced me too.

That's the problem with this country....no, it's broader than that. Our times. Very few people - hell companies too - accept personal responsibility anymore. Everyone wants a handout / bailout because they fucked up. Life and shit happen. People need to learn to deal with their own problems and not look to others to get them out of the mess, nor to blame.

I'll get off my soapbox now.

Peace.

Now if I were Omar, I would blame the lack of bold text appearing in my previous message on MDN because they didn't offer an easy tool to use to edit one's text.

Since I'm not Omar, the mistake is mine.

Peace.

@Predrag

You are of course correct about Apogee. I think Windows was just to big a pain in the posterior.
But there probably is a connection. Windows is a platform for cheapskates, and Apogee gear is pretty pricey. That probably led to a rather small market on the windows side. The windows crowd would rather use their cheapo soundblasters.

Coming back to the story at hand:

It seems strange that piracy is such a big thing for the iPhone, as it would require a huge number of Jailbroken iPhones to make any impact. Something tells me this Wired story smells very ratty.

MW: river. Cry me one, Wired.

Mar 31, 09 - 11:19 am Comment from: Anonymous©

Honestly, I have my doubts about this. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if alot of apps have been cracked, just because people will do it, just because they can do it; however, I'd be surprised if the pirate to paid ratio is 100 to 1 on some apps.

The reason is, do that many people really want to waste the time and effort to crack a 99 cent app, while running the risk of discovery? Two, if it's an expensive app, like that medical flashcard app, is it really the kind of app that crackers really want to pirate? Three, don't you have to jailbreak your phone first to do this, and what does that say about the jailbreak community? Four, if this were so prevalent, given the Apple community, why is this the first time I've heard of such a thing. None of the iPhone users I know have any pirated apps. Five, is there any breakdown between US piracy and international piracy? Would that tell us whether this is taking place in places where unlocking and jailbreaking are common?

I know someone who jailbroke his iphone in a chinatown shop in Los Angeles and installed crash bandicoot nitro kart 3d.

Guess they have been doing it for a while since this was back In September/October 2008

Mar 31, 09 - 11:29 am Comment from: NCMacMan

Using a quick search, there are several main sites that are actually using cracked apps to make money. One is iGUI.ru -- big surprise that its' from Russia? There is no whois information on this site.

Another one is mega4i which sells "access" to the apps on their servers to directly download onto your device. By the way, a quick whois search revealed this information:

Registrant
Domains by Proxy, Inc.
Scottsdale, Arizona
United States
Administrative Contact
Registration Private

Time to shut them down, boys...

My guess is that once you have a cracked app, you could copy it right into your iTunes applications folder and it would download to your device without any issues.

As a developer, this is a big problem. I also suspect that the majority of the files that are being cracked and installed must be coming from the iTouch teenage users. No money, all of the time, and nothing else to do.

Aside from what I can tell is the process, in the beginning someone, somewhere must first buy the app and then crack it and distribute it.

This could the most far fetched, absurd take ever from MDN - and that is saying a lot. How you can somehow blame windows users for security holes that Apple left in that allows piracy in the first place just shows how pathetic they are. Please, the days of the Apple inferiority complex should be long over. Their market share is rising because they are putting out good, but not perfect products. The need to continue to blindly lash out every time someone doesn't blindly sing Apple's praises is just sad.

Mar 31, 09 - 11:42 am Comment from: Ampar

"Too bad the penalty for this isnt death... i bet less people would do it."

Except for zombies and vampires.

So how DO you run a cracked app without jailbreaking your iPhone/iPod? How many people can really run these cracked apps?

And of course, every Apple software upgrade threatens to make a mess of your iPhone/iPod either way.

And if this is a problem, how bad will it be with Android, Pre and WinMobile?

And what the heck is MDN taking about?

Mar 31, 09 - 12:32 pm Comment from: G4Dualie

@Ronin

Wow, how dense are you? You think the problem is Apple's SDK?

No wonder, you're a loner. Loser.

Mar 31, 09 - 12:35 pm Comment from: pastrychef

The author, Brian X. Chen, is himself a pirate. He used an illegally downloaded hacked version of Mac OS X to install on a netbook. Hypocrite.

@G4Dualie

Let's see here - Apple made a system that allows 20% of the programs sold to be hacked, yet somehow it's Microsofts fault. Ooookay. Talk about dense...

"Where is the evidence that Mac users steal less than Windows users?"

Seems like you can blame Windows for everything these days.

The iPhone is a OS X device, making them all OS X computers. By inference everyone who steals for that platform is an OS X user stealing OS X software.

Where did Windows come it this?

"Wow, how dense are you? You think the problem is Apple's SDK?"

Because of the closed nature of the OS and the distribution system, vendors rely on Apple to protect their apps. That makes it Apple's problem to solve.

I know this is an old article, but I can't believe the ridiculous accusation that windows "sufferers" are pirates and mac users are better people with moral values that are more likely to pay for their software.

The fact is, iPhone and by extension ipod touch is the first platform that Apple has developed that is broadly used by so many people. Unfortunately when your platform is used by EVERYONE, you are going to have piracy. It is no different than cassette tapes, the VCR, CDs, etc.

The average Windows user isn't any more likely to pirate than the average Mac user, by their own intentions. Now, once you consider the fact that piracy is more readily available on the PC platform than Mac, yes it is more likely that the PC user is going to be presented with the option, but that doesn't mean that all the Mac users in the world wouldn't choose to download a free version of Photoshop versus shelling out the cash for it if they were presented the opportunity.

Really, this is almost like a pathetically ugly, boring person complaining about people who have casual sex and say that what that person is doing is wrong and how they are so great for being celibate.