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What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

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Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#311

Post by T-hawk »

sireat wrote: post #134
huhtenberg wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And nobody (read: very, very small percentage) is willing to type the credit car number on some unknown site to pay for some utility. So shareware died, and shareware authors went to the dark side. HAHAHA. Oh, jeez... /wipes a tear. You clearly have no idea how the shareware model actually works. Shareware is very very far from being dead. Yes, some of the devs take the lazy path of bundling crap, but it is an abso…

Serious question, is there shareware which is not dead today? Where are the shareware success stories? Where is PC-Write, PKZip or Commander Keen of 2015? I'd even settle for WinRAR of today.

Shareware involved two different ideas: the method of distribution, and the trial to paid purchase model.

Shareware was genius in encouraging users to copy programs around to each other in the primitive days of computer connectivity. But that's just no longer needed with distribution on the Internet.

The trial to paid purchase model is alive and well everywhere. Freemium games, time limited trialware, in-app purchases. It's not even noticeable as a success story any more, since so much of the entire software industry works that way. The Commander Keen of 2015 is League of Legends.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#312

Post by e40 »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #231
e40 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot say enough about ninite. They are brilliant. I moved to the Mac a year ago, and I miss it dearly. I wish they had a Mac version. It's so convenient. And safe. And easy. I paid them for something just because I wanted them to be successful. Single best product I used on Windows!

Have you tried GetMacApps? http://www.getmacapps.com/ I have a coworker who uses it, and it seems to be exactly like a Ninite for Mac.

I hadn't seen that. Thanks. What I was talking about above is the updater, which doesn't have an analog, AFAIK.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#316

Post by mschuster91 »

bentcorner wrote: post #281
Karunamon wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those numbers are somewhat sketchy if I recall right. Apple doesn't allow app authors to have access to an unchanging ID of a device, so if they're doing something like (number of changeable UIDs that touched our server) - (app store sales) = copies we should have been paid for ..then there's a huge problem with their methodology. It would fail on the basic use case of one user with one app store account installing t…

Methodology on Android is also problematic, for the same reasons: http://recode.net/2015/01/06/mobile-game-piracy-isnt-all-bad... Five percent are paid downloads, so the ratio is 9.5 to 1, but a portion of those are people who have both a phone and a tablet, people who have more than one Android device with them. So a small portion of that 95 percent is going to be taken up by those installs.

> So a small portion of that 95 percent is going to be taken up by those installs.

More! I have burned through four Android phones and three tablets with one google account. Everyone who upgrades their device makes "one pirated copy" by the logic of this study.

And a huge portion of the current (licensed, not the chinese ones without a valid Google license) Android phones are likely to be upgrades for older or broken devices.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#317

Post by shampine »

basch wrote: post #304
petecooper wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Kill adwcleaner with taskmanager. AdwCleaner requires a restart to finish up, as I understand it. If you know differently, I'm genuinely interested. >ComboxFix is unnecessary. Respectfully, I disagree. It's caught things that the others have missed. Anecdotal evidence, sure, but in my experience it's proven useful. Most of the time new laptops are not for speed purposes - there is a misconception that a new laptop i…

> It's caught things that the others have missed. What other things? Did you run FSecure, Panda, ESET, Emsisoft, Avira, Avast, Herdprotect? It might be useful, but it is dangerous. It should be an absolute last ditch effort, not standard procedure. >AdwCleaner requires a restart to finish up, as I understand it. Try running it twice in a row without a restart. Try running it before and after a malwarebytes scan, with…

Don't forget TDSSKiller and Norton Power Eraser. Super useful tools for checking MBRs.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#318

Post by mschuster91 »

lotharbot wrote: post #267
scrollaway wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I know quite a few people who are too broke to pay $1 for most apps. You are implying that people pirate $1 games "because they're too cheap to pay" which most of the time is just completely untrue - for a lot of people, it's a matter of not having the money. Some people here need to take a reality check break once in a while and look at people who don't make as much as they do.

If they somehow came up with the money to buy an iPhone -- $500+ unlocked, or $100+/month on a multi-year contract -- they don't "not [have] the money" to occasionally spend $1 on an app. They've just chosen to spend a lot on the phone itself, which might not leave much left over. Lest you think I'm speaking from a position of not understanding poverty: my salary in 2013 was $21k pre-tax, with a wife and a kid. I had…

Stolen iPhones, back in the days when there was no option for remote wipe/disable, or used iPhones (some friend got a 1st gen iphone for ~20€) can be dead cheap.

And honestly, I'd choose a working-order 1st gen iphone over any brickphone.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#319

Post by forgottenpass »

danielweber wrote: post #171
zxcdw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and that it's our own fault Whose fault exactly is it? Has anybody in HN worked with a company which does this crapware bundling, let alone creating? Or does anybody know anyone who's "in the business"? Because I, quite honestly, can't understand how or why people would be doing this. Is it really that "Well, I know this shit is going to infect thousands of machines with software which nobody would like to have, bu…

> Whose fault exactly is it? People who think that software should be free, as in beer. Developers have to be paid. When people paid for software with dollars, this exchange was much more straightforward. But now people think that software should be free as in beer, which means it comes with ad software or "sponsored software" that in turns sells ads, or spies on everything you do, or something to pay the bills.

Developers have to be paid. When people paid for software with dollars, this exchange was much more straightforward.

There are plenty of services I pay for that sell data about me and/or show me advertizements.

So this is an appealing story, but it only works until someone decides "I could get paid, AND sell the user to advertizes/data harvesters." It's always easy to make now-impossible scenarios into appealing hypotheticals, and I'm sure that market forces COULD mean that none of the software or services currently supported through advertizement and data harvesting invasive and advertizement wouldn't do so, but nobody can say for sure.

Re: What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps

#320

Post by kbenson »

raverbashing wrote: post #268
rev_bird wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the main points of this thread is that Apple specifically targeted people who _weren't_ trying to install it.

Ah I understand now. True, if you installed iTunes or QT and it installed it as extra, yeah, you probably have an older browser installed (but I think there's not that many people that still use it)

I think you are still missing the complete context of the original comment. Once a browser is set as default, for a significant portion of people that won't change unless they are somehow prompted or forced to change it again at a later date. To many people, the browser is just another part of the OS that allows viewing webpages, and they just call it "The internet".
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