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Comment by Skroob | Hacker News Reader

I'm honestly surprised that some people are so desperate to not pay $5 for Angry Birds. I mean, I sort of understand pirating $800 apps like Adobe's suite, but $5 for a bird slingshot game?

For full disclosure's sake, I am an iOS and Mac developer, so I have some skin in the game.

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Whoever wrote this clearly thought it would work on other, more expensive apps. Perhaps they didn't have the money to actually test it :)

Considering hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people get the same game for free on Android phones/tablets, there's some strangeness to paying for it on other platforms.

It's only free because the Android marketplace hasn't yet matured enough for a paid app. To compensate, the Android version has ads.

It's definitely matured enough, and Rovio initially intended to release a paid app alongside the free one.

However, they still haven't, and given that press release from a month or so ago stating they were on track to earn $1m per month from the "free" version, I'm starting to see why they haven't. I doubt they'd make anywhere near as much ongoing ad revenue if they released the game for a dollar or two.

They get the game with ads. There is no strangeness at all about not paying for a version with ads and paying for a version without them.

I looked over the shoulder of someone playing Angry Birds with ads. The paid version was worth every penny.

There is nothing on this earth more jarring to a game design than having some out-of-context ad pop up on the screen. Particularly when the screen is already half the size of a decent postcard.

Disable 3G and wireless on your Android phone and you won't see any ads :)

I would gladly pay to play Angry Birds ad-free on Android.

Or at least, I would have while I was still playing it.

> Or at least, I would have while I was still playing it.

Ohhh nice burn. ;)

Actually, it's not a burn. The game, like most others, only has so many levels. I've gotten past all of them, and I don't find it fun to try to get 3 stars on them all. So until it updates with more levels, I don't feel any need to play it.

As a friend of mine pointed out when I complained:

http://www.cyrket.com/p/android/com.bigtincan.android.adfree...

I'm not going to comment on the ethics, just noting that there is a "solution." (Also: requires root)

I recently bought an Archos 101 Android tablet and installed Angry Birds (from the included AppsLib).

I never saw any ad...

Bug or feature?

I think you assume the wrong motivation.

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