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Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

iOS has negligible piracy? That's news to me.

I think that piracy should be a non-concern at all. The first barrier is getting a product out there that someone, anyone is actually using. With the massive over saturation of the app stores, and the "if it is not on the first page it does not exist" mentality visibility is much bigger problem. If you have the audience from somewhere else you may be able to make them install an app. But otherwise - with the current incarnation of the walled gardens this will be a tough one.

I can't find the article right now, but there was recently a game developer that was crippled by piracy. Essentially the online part of the iOS game was swamped with pirate users, and there wasn't enough funding from real users for the servers to be sustainable or even worthwhile.

That is a different problem. If people play your game it means you are doing something right, so you must work on your revenue and communication with users strategy. Also if you have client server architecture you have much easier time just discarding the pirate users. If apple prevents you from distinguishing between types of users - that is serious platform deficiency. Otherwise it just requires a DB check before allowing access of the user to the server.

There have been cases where a product receives critical acclaim, is widely pirated and failed commercially.

XBOX 360 had the ability to pirate games since 2007-ish, and PS3 was much harder in this department. You didn't see abandonment of the X360 platform from the developers.

I don't think the App has any way of knowing if it is running without the proper signing or not. They can try and read outside of their sandbox, but Apple doesn't seem to acknowledge piracy as an issue, so the APi doesn't exist.

To do piracy in iOS, you have to jailbreak iOS device. If you compare to Android, you can consider it negligible.

Nah uh.

You can simply resign an IPA as your own. There's a bunch of websites offering their signing certificates a service specifically for pirates.

Why on earth would anyone bother to pirate a $0.99 app???

I've absolutely no idea.

ios has piracy just like any other infrastructure, but its several levels of magnitude better than android.

No it's not. Several developers have already said iOS piracy is very comparable to Android piracy.

Also what a poorly written article - using data from 2011. Android has grown at least 2x since then, and it has somewhere between 30-40 billion downloads by now.

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