"My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"

"My iOS app is being pirated. Over 90% haven't paid for it. What can I do?"
reddit.com

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.

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.

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.

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?