31–36 of 36 posts
We have some free and some non-free apps in the store, and we've never given the piracy stuff a second thought. We were actually pretty stoked when we saw the first game pirated. It made us feel legit. ;-)
You can't stop people from pirating your app. Not to mention, I'm sure most of us have pirated something, at some point, as well. I'd personally let them keep the files up. As it's been said, another user is another user. He'll show it to his friends who might buy it instead of pirating. Another option to help fight people pirating would be to offer a free version. Maybe limit how many things they can add to their li…
That's ok if you application is "standalone", but what happens when your app needs some backend webservice to properly run? We pay for servers, we can't pirate them. I read articles from developers telling that most of their users are pirates. How could we use this situation to our advantage?
* Require simple registration and validate against app purchasers
* Make the app free and charge for premium features that work with the web-based back end
If something is priced reasonably and provides good value, users will pay for it. iOS buyer statistics are a great case study.
My sympathies. I'm about to launch a PlayBook app and am fervently hoping that piracy is less of an issue with BlackBerry users. Also - I came across http://getdenso.com/ a few days ago which appears to do roughly the same thing as your app - have you heard of them? I inquired with them for an API that I might utilize to bring a BlackBerry PlayBook app into existence, and I'd like to extend to you the same offer. If…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, and you might be able to tell if the device is jailbroken, but that has no relation on whether the person paid for your app or not. Don't confuse that.
What do you think? Should we try to track that in the backend?
With luck, you can probably discover why people pirate your apps. Maybe due to price, or that your nearest competitor has a better user experience, etc.
You can try to fight it, by making your most used features something which needs App Store authorization, but I suspect that will just piss off your customers who already paid for it and they will start putting 1-star ratings in the App Store.
We had our app pirated a few weeks ago, it didn't have any impact on the sales. People who pirate your app wouldn't buy it anyway I imagine. Unless it was really well-known and great - but then there's no chance of it not being pirated.
You can verify if the device is jailbroken, but as @wccrawford said couple of comments below - they might have paid for it. And I know many people using jailbroken devices and not pirating one thing.
Party! Your app was deemed worth pirating.