According to our friend Alex Heath at Cult of Mac, Apple has been aggressively pursuing legal avenues to prevent piracy of iOS apps. They have sent a large number of DMCA takedown notices to Apptrackr, the servers which apparently provide a method for illegally downloading apps from the App Store.
The person behind Apptrackr goes by the name “dissident” and has been reaching out to his fellow pirates explaining how they continue to keep the service running. One method has been the introduction of mobile advertising and the introduction of captcha. The ads are supposedly to help offset the costs of hosting at international sites, which makes it a bit more difficult for Apple to takedown.
Good for Apple. It’s taken entirely too long for them to jump in and fight this battle on behalf of developers who are seeing their hard work pirated. Is it too much to ask someone to pony up $0.99 for an app?
Source: Cult of Mac
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It’s nice to see Apple making the effort to protect their developers. I think this is a case of “it’s the thought that counts” as I don’t believe taking down apptrackr will hinder piracy much.
From my vantage point as a dev who has released a game on another platform and working on an iOS title I try not to lose sleep over piracy. At some point a dev has to realize that people willing to go through the effort of jailbreaking their devices and pirating are most not potential customers. It’s a mistake to think of 1 pirated download as 1 lost sale.
Hard to pony up .99? Well if people ponied up .99 for every app they wanted to try it could add up to thousands. With no way to return crap apps, there is little option to try apps before you buy.
Between reviews and the low cost of apps, I think it’s pretty easy to make an informed decision.
I disagree. Reviews can be padded far too easy by the friends of the Dev. And again, if I pay for every app I would like to try, then the cost would be thousands even at .99 each.
I agree with Tim. I’m all about supporting the Dev for their hard work but I get sick of being shafted for a bad app. And to add to that, most of the apps I’m interested aren’t .99…more like $4.99. So when is Apple going to employ the “refund” button?