Piracy Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

StarDunk going to a free demo model

by Mike Schramm (Sep 25th, 2010)

StarDunk is one of my most favorite apps recently, ever since I covered it back for Daily App a little while ago. It's an amusing little 2D basketball game, made even more impressive by the fact that it juggles online multiplayer across the world -- as you throw baskets, you're also playing in ...

Mac indie dev asks The Pirate Bay to keep a torrent of his software

by Richard Gaywood (Aug 25th, 2010)

As a software developer myself, I know how hard it is to see your product being ripped off. We have recently reported on how even $2 iPhone games (like Stardunk) or iPad games (like Aqua Globs HD) are not immune despite their low cost and closed platforms. Their developers have reported piracy rates ...

iPad app dev sees 50% piracy rate

by Mike Schramm (Aug 24th, 2010)

We've heard horror stories of piracy from iPhone developers before, but PocketGamer has news of an iPad developer also suffering from a surprising amount of customers who likely didn't actually pay for their software. Qwiboo says that its iPad app, Aqua Globs HD, is seeing about 50% of its ...

Arrrrr. The pirates have plundered StarDunk

by Steven Sande (Aug 16th, 2010)

You'd think that an iOS game that was originally priced at $0.99 and is now selling for $1.99 wouldn't have a piracy problem. You'd be wrong. French game developer Godzilab recently tweeted that they've seen a 37.5% piracy rate for their massively mulitplayer online basketball game, StarDunk. ...

Don't get too excited about the App Store's Try Before You Buy

by TJ Luoma (Aug 6th, 2010)

As Steve mentioned earlier this morning, 9to5Mac spotted a new section in the App Store called Try Before You Buy. Don't get too excited about the idea of demos finally coming to the App Store, however. As of right now, this is only an index of "Lite" or free versions of apps. If you were hoping ...

The iPad and eBook piracy

by Sang Tang (May 18th, 2010)

In the week following the launch of the iPad, six of the top ten selling business-related paperbacks saw a significant spike in unauthorized downloads on BitTorrent, according to BitTorrent news blog TorrentFreak. This cohort saw average increases of 78 percent over the week prior to the iPad ...

Humble Indie Bundle moving towards $1 million, still being pirated

by Mike Schramm (May 11th, 2010)

The Humble Indie Bundle that we posted about the other day is doing quite well -- they've raised almost US$800,000 by selling five indie games (playable on Mac, Linux, and Windows) for pay-what-you-will. In fact, they've done so well that they've added another game into the mix -- you'll also get ...

360iDev: Saurik on the mobile application market

by Mike Schramm (Apr 13th, 2010)

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 ...

Pirates make away with $450 million in App Store booty?

by Chris Rawson (Jan 13th, 2010)

24/7WallSt. reports that Apple and third-party developers have lost approximately $450 million in revenue from App Store piracy since the store opened in July of 2008. Out of this, $140 million of this counts as lost revenue for Apple – a huge chunk of the $500 - $700 million in revenue the ...

An app with everything but sales

by Mike Schramm (Dec 17th, 2009)

TriplePoint PR's site has a post on their blog about Orbital [iTunes Link], an iPhone game released a while back that I presume is one of their clients. Obviously, they've done their job: we're talking about the game, which is $.99US or available in a lite free version [iTunes Link]. But they've ...

iPhone app claims 95% piracy rate

by Mike Schramm (Oct 28th, 2009)

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, ...

iCombat's stats on app pirates

by Mike Schramm (May 15th, 2009)

Miguel Sanchez-Grice, creator of the iCombat app (a remake of the old Atari game), sent us these stats on piracy of his app after writing a blog post about the same thing, and I find them fascinating. Instead of building DRM into his app, he just detected if the player was using a copy that wasn't ...

Pirated iWork contains botnet trojan, breaks hearts

by Aron Trimble (Apr 23rd, 2009)

The tubes are ablaze today with news from CNN of the first ever latest malicious program to be found on the Mac. The trojan was first discovered in January but it did not receive wildfire-like popularity until recently when two experts at Symantec published a bulletin on the subject of the malware. ...

Wired dives into App Store piracy

by Christina Warren (Apr 1st, 2009)

App Store piracy is a growing concern for more and more developers, thanks to tools like Crackulous and various BitTorrent trackers. Although developers are fighting back, this is a problem that really isn't going away. So how widespread is App Store piracy? Earlier this week, Wired's Brian X. Chen ...

iPhone app phones home to foil pirates

by Michael Rose (Mar 9th, 2009)

Like many iPhone developers, Ben Chatelain is frustrated to see cracked versions of his project, Full Screen Web Browser, showing up online. Following the usability suggestions of John Gruber, Ben has chosen to do something about it. The latest version of his app has detection capabilities for ...