Re:What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps
by bentcorner on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @12:22PM
(#8881164)
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.
Re:What Happens When You Install the Top Download.com Apps
by mschuster91 on Tuesday January 13, 2015 @01:42PM
(#8881681)
> 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.
(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 the app on more than one device (especially with kid friendly games like this), or re installs after a device wipe, or reinstalls after a user with a busted phone gets a new one, and so on.
As usual, bad statistics being used in defense of the piracy bogeyman. The number of people who jailbreak their phones is a tiny minority of iOS users, and the number of people who do so to pirate is an even tinier minority of that.
Even as someone that has no moral issues with downloading apps for free, I can tell you that it's not worth it on iOS. The contrast between the "it just works"-ness of the app store, and the hoops you need to jump through to get free apps is jarring.