Over the last few years, piracy has become a major problem in the App Store. In 2011, for instance, I had twice as many apps pirated as sold. You will hear a lot of naive appreneurs say, “Piracy is not a big deal; people who pirate would not have bought your app anyway.” This is just flat-out wrong. Consider the following illustration. A user pirates the paid version of your app. You are making nothing from the user. Following the logic that this person would never have paid for the app allows him or her to download your free, ad-backed, version. You will now generate revenue from the user by serving him or her ads. Users who pirate apps are much less likely to buy them; however, there are plenty of users who will download a free app with ads. If you have an application that has server costs, make sure you do something to prevent piracy, or pirates will eat up a ton of those costs. Believe me, it is a dismal feeling when you search for your app’s name, followed by dot-ipa, only to see it all over the Internet in every cracked app store. You basically have two options: manually send each cracked app store and hosting site Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notificaton, instructing that the app be taken down, or prevent piracy from occurring in the first place. My first reaction was to serve DMCA paperwork to each offender. This was the most time-consuming and tedious task I have ever taken on. In the end, I gave up on trying to prevent piracy on my own. I was approached by the company AntiPi (www.antipi.net ), which claimed it could prevent piracy. I was skeptical, to say the least. I decided it would be worth a try, though, and I was very happy with the results. This company literally takes down all your pirated apps from the cracked app stores. The AntiPi software inserts within the pirated versions of the apps a legal message, followed by only one, clickable button: “Buy the app in the App Store.” This was exactly what I was looking for—a way of converting pirated apps to sales. Obviously, not every person who pirated the app is going to buy it; however, I have noticed that approximately 1 in 50 does. Although this may sound like a relatively low conversion rate, these numbers can add up drastically when you consider the thousands of copies being downloaded a day.

Some people tend to minimize the issue and contend that pirating actually serves as a form of free advertisement. I disagree wholeheartedly with that notion. First, any time your app is pirated, someone has gotten it for free. Second, people who pirate apps are proud of what they do and will often brag about it in your app to other users. I had an app that had a lobby chat room that allowed users to chat interactively. I noticed that once my app became readily available in the cracked app stores, hundreds of people in my chat room were boasting about how they got the app for free. As you can imagine, the users who paid for my app were quite upset with this. Third, the people who were using the pirated version of my app were also using features that required server calls, which cost money. Finally, the increasing ease with which pirates are able to jailbreak is worrying. Recently, jailbroken devices have been enabled to download in-app purchases for free. Many developers took the route of adding in-app purchases in their apps as a way of preventing piracy. This no longer is a viable option. The only in-app purchases that cannot be cracked are those that are server validated, so if you decide to use in-app purchases to fend off piracy, make sure they have this feature.

No matter how big or small your app, piracy will always be a problem, and that is why you should do your best to prevent it. Again, I highly recommend AntiPi for this. The company charges very reasonable rates and takes care of all of the grunt work. You also will get a monthly report showing how many copies of your app were kept from the pirates. My first month, more than 150,000 copies were prevented from being pirated. Prevention did not result in 150,000 extra sales, but that is still a lot of people who won’t be using my app for free and costing me money and headaches.

Piracy has the ability to crush industries (look at what Napster did to the music industry). Whatever the size of your app, it is only a matter of time until it gets cracked. Heed my advice, and take action to circumvent this.