We’ve heard before that piracy is just killing Android developers. It’s such a wide scale problem that some devs are finding little incentive, between piracy and fragmentation, to actually release their games on Android.
Sadly, the problem doesn’t seem to be getting any better. Another developer has just released details on the massive problem they are having on Android with app piracy. How bad is it? Piracy on Android outnumbers iOS piracy by fourteen to one. Woof!
It was only yesterday that we found out that music streaming apps like Spotify and Rdio are helping kill music piracy, as the music industry reported that global revenue rose in 2012 for the first time in 13 years.
Well, according to a different report that crunched some serious numbers, Apple’s iTunes Store played a big part in the music industry’s growth, by accounting for 60 percent of global digital music revenues.
Too cheap to actually buy Tweetbot, Tapbot’s awesome Twitter app for iPhone, iPad and Mac? Are you pirating it despite the fact that it only costs a couple bucks, and Tweetbot has a limited number of tokens that it can distribute before Twitter says they can’t sell their client anymore?
Well, Tweetbot’s not going to force you to do anything, but they have started autofilling the Tweet box in its iOS app to publically broadcast that they are no-good, dirty pirates.
Hackulous has announced that it has shut down Installous, the one-stop shop for “cracked” or pirated apps and games on iOS. The team blames “stagnant” forums and the difficulty in moderating them as the reason behind its decision to kill the service, which will undoubtedly be a huge victory against iOS software piracy. At least for now.
Hunted Cow released its new iOS game, Battle Dungeon, in the App Store less than a week ago, and the title has already been pulled. Why? Rampant piracy. The number of illegitimate users put such a strain on the game’s servers that Hunted Cow was forced to shut it down.
The RPG-like strategy game allowed users to play with each other and compete in leader boards, upgrade characters, etc. It’s a sad day for the game’s paying users.
After nearly a decade, my iTunes library weighs in at almost ninety-four gigabytes. A lot of serious music nerds would sneeze derisively at that, but it still represents over 13,000 songs that would take me, from start to finish, a full 48 days to listen to back to back.
I’d be lying if I said most of these had been acquired legally. Most of these albums were acquired on Bittorrent in my twenties. Many more were ripped from CDs lent to me by friends and family, or slurped up from Usenet to satisfy my obscure yet surface-thin musical fixations. Some were purchased through iTunes or other sources online, but truthfully, if you stripped everything out of my iTunes library that I’d acquired legally, I’d probably have a digital music library that could fit on a first generation iPod.
Over the course of the last two years, though, something interesting has happened. I’ve grown a conscience. These days, all of the music I listen to is listened to legally. But iTunes not only has no part in it. In fact, for the past two years, my iTunes library has just been collecting dust: a graveyard to the music piracy of my youth.
I’m ashamed of it. I want to try to explain things. Both why I started pirating music, why I stopped, and how, in fits and starts, being a music pirate helped transform me into someone who cared enough about music to buy it.
Not long go, we reported to you that the FPS Dead Trigger had given up the fight and gone free on Android, due to an “unbelievably high” piracy rate. Today, it appears that Madfinger Games, the developers behind Dead Trigger have given in and made the game free on iOS as well.
If you thought the iOS App Store had issues with piracy, think again. The Google Play store, home to over 500,000 Android apps, is in a much worse position. Apparently, piracy on the Android platform is such an issue that developers are, in a sense, beginning to give up.
The developers behind Dead Trigger, an FPS available on both Android and iOS, have decided to give up the fight, and are now making the popular game completely free on Google Play, due to the outrageous piracy.
If you live outside the U.S and UK, you’ll find that the easiest and quickest way to get your favorite TV shows onto your iPad is via BitTorrent. But until now, you had to do some heavy post-download processing to make the XVID files play on your iPad, or at least use third-party software to play it.
Now, many BitTorrent groups have switched to the x264 MP4 format for most new releases. That’s good news for iPad and Apple TV users, but there’s even more entertainment to be had from this story: The BitTorrent pirates are crowing about the switch and even threatening to boycott the downloads.
Yes, you read that right. Pirates are threatening to boycott illegal TV show downloads.
Apple has begun an attack on App Store piracy. The popular resource for cracked iOS apps known as Apptrackr recently said that Apple has begun sending large amounts of takedown notices, thereby forcing Apptrackr to relocate many of its servers and implement more steps for its users to avoid legal ramifications.
In a note to users of Installous, a Cydia app for downloading and installing pirated apps from the App Store, Apptrackr frontman “dissident” explains Apple’s attempts at crippling the piracy service and how Apptrackr supporters can help keep the resource running.
![Hackulous Shuts Down Installous, The Pirate App Library For iOS [Jailbreak]](http://cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/install0us11-500x386.jpg "Installous")
