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I'm sorry, but the Monument Valley iOS piracy numbers from Dan Gray quoted in that article are positively nonsense. > It’s impossible for us to track that data

I'm sorry, but the Monument Valley iOS piracy numbers from Dan Gray quoted in that article are positively nonsense. > It’s impossible for us to track that data. The only thing we can do is, two bits of data: One, how many purchases we have and, two, how many installs we’ve got. And we just leave people to draw conclusions from that as they wish, because we can’t clarify any further than that. Once you purchase an app on an iTunes account, you can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into. So the fact that Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases is 100% consistent with zero piracy, and with the fact that as people replace their devices they want to redownload the apps with the greatest replay value. This is not some weird trick that Apple overlooked, either. They clearly want the user to believe that the apps and the data are tied to the account rather than the phone, because new hardware sales are where they make the lion's share of their profit. (I thought his numbers were bogus, which is what motivated me to read the article. In recent years, jailbreaking iOS devices, which is a prerequisite for pirating apps, has become increasingly bothersome and decreasingly useful. So the thought that there were this many jailbreakers didn't coincide with my model of the world.)

tristanj 11y ago
> You can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into ... So Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases No, it doesn't work like that. Android and iOS installs are separate, if you buy it through one app store it doesn't transfer to the other. Combining the Android and iOS numbers together to reduce that ratio is dishonest. Just looking at Android, the installs to purchases ratio works out to 20 to 1 ... do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? C'mon. Read through the OP article as well. He also a encountered significant amount of mobile piracy, specifically on Android. There is widespread mobile piracy going on, arguing about installs-to-purchases ratios does nothing to hide it.
- spacehome 11y ago
  > do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? No, I don't. My point was specifically about iOS, because I know how much of a pain it is to keep a jailbroken phone, and I have a good sense of the general population and how many of them do so. (I develop a rather popular iOS app, and we have telemetry in the app that determines whether the device is jailbroken. We have multiple tests for whether a device is jailbroken. Jailbreak developers could fool all of our tests if they chose to do so. However, since we don't actually do anything with that data, we don't give anyone a reason to spoof them. In our population of users, jailbreakers make up less than 1%.)

tristanj 11y ago

> You can install the app on any number of devices that you're logged into ... So Monument Valley has 2.5x more installs than purchases No, it doesn't work like that. Android and iOS installs are separate, if you buy it through one app store it doesn't transfer to the other. Combining the Android and iOS numbers together to reduce that ratio is dishonest. Just looking at Android, the installs to purchases ratio works out to 20 to 1 ... do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? C'mon. Read through the OP article as well. He also a encountered significant amount of mobile piracy, specifically on Android. There is widespread mobile piracy going on, arguing about installs-to-purchases ratios does nothing to hide it.

spacehome 11y ago
> do you seriously believe that can be explained through multiple installs? No, I don't. My point was specifically about iOS, because I know how much of a pain it is to keep a jailbroken phone, and I have a good sense of the general population and how many of them do so. (I develop a rather popular iOS app, and we have telemetry in the app that determines whether the device is jailbroken. We have multiple tests for whether a device is jailbroken. Jailbreak developers could fool all of our tests if they chose to do so. However, since we don't actually do anything with that data, we don't give anyone a reason to spoof them. In our population of users, jailbreakers make up less than 1%.)