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

No, I'm American. Read about it on Wikipedia and some other sites. I'm a bit of an amateur linguist, so it's interesting to me (though also sad - the internet is the future, so without online usage, a language has no future).

India has so many languages that all official business is done in English. Since (just like in every other country) computers first appeared in big businesses, only English support was needed. The types of people working at those companies are fluent in English. Most of them went to English-medium schools ever since kindergarten. All of the universities are English-medium, so if you don't learn everything in English from when you're little, you'll never stand a chance in the hypercompetitive university entrance exams.

This made computer adoption very easy - just get some American computers and you're good to go. No time wasted localizing anything. Localization would have been a huge problem in India (a much bigger problem than China) because there are so many languages, and they all have a different script. A veritable nightmare for computer vendors - how many types of keyboards do you have to stock and keep track of? In the cities (where computers appeared first), there would be people from all over the country, speaking and writing all kinds of different languages. There's no one language that everyone knows that you can standardize on.

In China, OTOH, the strong, authoritarian central government made sure that everyone was educated in one language (Mandarin), and even if they weren't, the same script is used by all the languages (since it's character-based, not phonetic-based). This means that all business in China is conducted in Mandarin, and of course, nationalistic fervor wouldn't have allowed computers to simply remain unlocalized. Moreover, the phonetic pinyin input system doesn't require keyboard localization, so the Chinese just use American keyboards as well.

It's almost as if people can't have everything they want! How unfair!

You disagree that serverside software is harder to pirate than clientside software? You're wrong.

I think what's happening here is that you're not following Patrick's advice to the logical conclusion he's trying to lead you to. He's not suggesting that you SEO an existing iOS application. He's suggesting that you hoist the parts of that application that are worth money into a server and require people to have paid accounts on the server.

This has been Patrick's response to (utterly pointless and exasperating) piracy discussions on HN for at least two years now. He's not being glib. He's repeating himself, concisely.

You are close to the answer, but not quite there.

You see a lot of government work has to be done in the vernacular ( by political necessity) - and the defacto tool for written communication happens to be Word. Now, I have been trying to (as part of Accountability Initiative and other egov channels) get the govt to adopt open source alternatives like OpenOffice. But the problem is that complex Indic languages are NOT a priority for either Gnome or KDE (and frankly dont work that well on Linux). For example, the Harfbuzz project mentions somewhere For established scripts though, there is not much reason to prefer Graphite over OpenType. Graphite is of course, the Indic compatible smartfont technology. Again, I might be completely wrong by way of technology, but the fact remains that the world's fastest growing computing market doesnt have significant linux mindshare. Very sad considering tha it is very very easy to do that in India.. much more than Europe or America, where you have to de-Apple people.

What really, really hurts me though is the fact that a significant (>70%) number of Indian colleges teach programming in Borland C. Why ? well it is easy to blame our cultural proclivity to resist change - but the easier answer is that they dont know any better. Remember, India does not have a significant amount of internet penetration: Network effects happen more due to physical communities rather than electronic ones .

Asia (and especially India) is at the cusp of an open-source revolution just because we cant afford anything else. Come over and start one.

My point is that piracy can be very good for small companies and is an indication that people like what you're doing.