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360iDev: Saurik on the mobile application market
Jay "Saurik" Freeman took the stage here at 360iDev last night to explain the mobile application marketplace. The entire mobile application marketplace, that is. Most people wrongly perceive the App Store to be a simple user-and-developer relationship, but in reality, it's a much more complicated place, with lots of inputs and outputs for time, money, and work. You can see the big picture of his chart above -- the "user" is the faceless woman near the middle, and the "developer" is the bearded man to her left. But everything else is a company or a connection that Saurik spoke about. Saurik runs the jailbreak app store Cydia (which has over 10,000 packages available, hundreds of which for a fee, on which they've pulled in over $1.3 million so far), and so he's closely interested in almost all facets of this relationship chart, and how money can flow from users of all kinds to developers across the world. In an entertaining and very insightful presentation, he basically walked the audience through his chart and, piece by piece, gave a wide-reaching overview of how the mobile app marketplace works today.
iPhone app claims 95% piracy rate
digg_url = 'http://digg.com/security/iPhone_app_claims_95_piracy_rate'; With all of the success stories coming out of the App Store, it's been pretty easy to forget the problem of piracy for most developers. Not so for Fishlabs, who've posted over on the Touch Arcade forums that their latest game, Rally Master Pro 3D, is experiencing a 95% piracy rate. You read that right: supposedly 95% of the people playing the game on the iPhone haven't paid for it. There's probably a multitude of reasons why that is -- the app is $7 with no trial version, it's not a super-popular app quite yet (so one pirated copy on a popular message board is probably traveling farther than the copies coming off of the official App Store), and there are probably at least a few other factors in the mix that we don't know yet. Still, 95% is obviously pretty darn high for a platform that's supposed to only deliver software through Apple's official store. Now, fortunately Fishlabs doesn't sound litigious -- they're not pulling the old "piracy = lost sales" fallacy that many companies in this situation would do. They are lowering the price on the app -- they expected it to be worth more, but apparently their consumer base seems to disagree. They tell Mobile Entertainment that they'd entertain the idea of providing content only through Apple's in-app purchasing service (presumably, that would prevent piracy by locking down the extra content), but they also say that's a gamble they've tried and missed on other platforms before. Of course, it'll take more than one post on one message board to make hay out of the problem of app piracy -- it definitely happens, but on the other hand, there certainly are apps selling well, and there are also apps not selling well that don't have this level of piracy going on. Apple already has lots of authentication and validation processes in place, but if app piracy is this big a problem for everyone, they may need to look at more.
