Piracy has existed on every platform including the "locked down" iOS.
Reshared post from +Koushik Dutta
My Response to Dead Trigger's statement on Android Piracy
via DeadTrigger:
"At first we intend to make this game available for as many people as possible — that's why it was for as little as buck," the developer explained on Facebook. "However, even for one buck, the piracy rate is soooo giant, that we finally decided to provide DEAD TRIGGER for free."
[How to download pirated apps?] Pretty easy. You search the internet for pirate copies of apps, then copy them onto your (regular, unrooted, non-“jailbroken”) device, and launch them. The system is designed for piracy from the ground up. The existence of piracy isn’t a surprise, but rather an inevitability.
Personally, I think these guys are giant idiots. Piracy is not something that is new or exclusive to Android. PC piracy is just as "rampant".
In the mobile space, piracy is even more seamless on iOS due to a third party app store dedicated to piracy (Installous). No "adb" sideload necessary.
Their crappy game failed to garner interest, so they saved their egos by blaming piracy. Sounds like something the MPAA would say to explain away Gigli: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/gigli/
Here's a tip:
1) Write a decent game
2) Use some server side DRM
3) Profit
Edit:
Furthermore, it seems like they realized that it is a better business model to upsell in app purchases, and have the game be a free loss leader to get downloads. This may just be a deceitful way to minimize the customer backlash by people that initially bought the game for a dollar.
