Pinch Media is claiming that an average of 34% of iPhone app installs are pirated and that the piracy affects 60% of apps in general. A few months ago, the developer modified their analytic software so that apps could identify and report pirate installs. Using the accumulated data, they’ve just posted a slideshow of piracy and jailbreaking stats.

Although it’s not terribly surprising to discover that jailbroken iPhones are being subverted for piracy, the histograms and scatter plots in the presentation are fascinating. If you head over to their site, you can see the life cycle of piracy, pirate usage patterns, and even the relationships among geography, GDP, and piracy rates. Technically, the geography graphs are suspect, because they plot jailbreaking rates against geography and then call it piracy, but whether or not you think that’s good enough is up to your personal tolerance for weak correlative relationships.

According to Gamasutra, “Pinch Media had considered selling anti-piracy protection but decided against it.” The reported reason is because a single copy protection solution used across all iPhone apps would be easier to circumvent. However, iPhone app developers have been understandably reluctant to make use of DRM, probably because the iPhone’s image as a high-accessibility device would be at odds with DRM kludge. So it seems more likely that the real reason is that iPhone DRM would be a business loser.

Incidentally, if you’re ever arguing with a pirate who just wants to “Try before they buy,” Pinch media has some great data to shut them down. The conversion rate (the percentage of users who buy a paid version of software) for users of free lite software is about seven percent. The conversion rate for pirates is about a half of one percent.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tags:   iphone · piracyNo Comments

Trackback to this article.