Our statistics on iOS App Piracy based on usage, device and top 25 countries where piracy is rampant for the last year (2011) final quarter.

You can see that even now app consumers are using the older version of iOS and still accessing pirate apps – we would like to hear from Mobile App developers like you on how you handle piracy and encourage you to spread about mtiks iOS anti-piracy solution.

Today, US government took down megaupload from its Virginia servers and arrested the owner in Australia. File Sharing sites are making piracy worse and they grow their file repository day by day.

“If legitimate content is housed on the same service that might have infringing content, it gets sucked into this vortex and it’s gone,” says Dennis Fisher, security blogger at Threatpost.com.

After arresting owners, US Department of Justice ordered them to pay $500 millions in lost revenues to pirated films, music and other content. They were arrested in New Zealand. Yesterday and sometime back, lots of US technology companies fought against SOPA & PIPA bills. As of Friday, Congress shelved anti-piracy bills and also did act on megaupload.com.

People were paying a small amount to download illegal music, movies and other contents. megaupload owner made $42 millions just in 2011 alone. Megaupload may have a contingency plan and it may grow or reappear from different places. Some people started posting things on Facebook, Twitter and lots of other internet websites. Megaupload seems to have 150 million registered users and 50 million hits daily. After FBI took it down, they posted the following warning on megaupload site.

Microsoft is making several improvements in its OS from the beginning. Recent Mango release made debut for new features and improvements. The adoption rate is also improving with WP7 customers with the choices of manufacturers.

In the Windows Phone 7 device manufacturers list, HTC & Samsung are among the top. There are lots of new vendors coming into this OS support slowly. Recent introduction of Nokia phones are making their way. We started seeing Dell devices making a small percentage among the whole.

As you can see above, HTC is clearly taking 68% of the whole traffic among all other devices. This data has been collected from mtiks implemented apps and their usage among different devices. The above data shows that HTC customers are using the apps longer. This may be due to ease of use and the number of devices available in the market.

We also analyzed individual devices who tends to have a longer usage time and usage. The top 5 devices share 18% each for HTC & Samsung devices overall. But Samsung focus has been seen as one among 5 devices using WP7 apps.

Breakdown among top 50 WP7 devices:

mtiks has seen so far 125+ WP7 devices from 11 different manufacturers.

Apple started its mobile AppStore a while ago and things were really cool and innovative to start with. The moment Cydia and other groups started thinking about Apple’s closeness strategy and wanted to go out of the way to make room for custom development, security issues started on a smaller scale.

First iteration started with Unlocking ability and exposing API’s to write custom themes, apps and other interesting utilities.

Second iteration is to trap and release different MobileSubstrates. These substrates introduced a way for illegal ways to cracking apps and doing malicious things. Lots of studies proved that there is a significant loss of revenue for App Publishers by letting people download illegal copies of paid apps for FREE. This came through apps like Install0us and other well known apps in black market.

Third iteration is to share apps like AirShare and Peer to Peer app sharing world. This even made worse things to App Publishers by letting any novice Cydia user to share legitimate paid apps to other people as illegal paid apps for FREE.

Out of these approaches, Apple’s stand was that you can protect your apps with In App Purchases. Is it true or true still ? There is a new iAP Cracker which lets you download limited populate apps by bypassing actual purchase and unlock features for FREE. This is the only thing left for App Publishers to feel safe not worrying about crack or losing revenue. Now that one is prone to cracking and the chunk will be a lot worse with these new additions.

Every app publisher should consider designing apps with security in mind for 2 reason. One is to protect their investment and not let it be loose for hacking community. And the last one is to give the consumers what they deserve to be the paid customers among these unpaid/crack user groups.

Apple released its sixth BETA of iOS 5 today to developers. But there was this notion of deprecation with UDID access.

Deprecated in iOS 5.0

uniqueIdentifier
An alphanumeric string unique to each device based on various hardware details. (read-only) (Deprecated in iOS 5.0. Instead, create a unique identifier specific to your app.)

This is a big change for us and other analytics or ad networks for mobile. Even though there are other alternatives to get around having unique identifiers, it will impact existing apps which will now have to go through a newer unique identifier. The existing uniqueIdentifier is really unique across all apps running with the analytics framework. But the new one need to be modified to be unique only with each of the provider who is offering this feature. Apple made this as deprecated and still no clear plan on when this will be completely eliminated.

There is an alternate solution provided by Georg Kitz here.

Lots have been happening in WP7 during the month of February – Microsoft & Nokia deal, WP7 Marketplace free app submission limit increased from 5 to 100, crossing 8000+ apps, Microsoft employees developing WP7 apps, free WP7 device handouts and more.

At mtiks, we have overwhelming signup and support from WP7 app publishers from day one and we are glad to provide some insights on WP7 App Statistics by device, country and usage for the month of February, 2011 based on WP7 applications using mtiks analytics.

Top 10 Devices by App Numbers

The overall percentage based on devices:
HTC: 56%
Samsung: 32%
LG: 12%
In the chart below you can see the ratio of those devices between the models.

Top 10 Countries by WP7 App Usage

Windows Phone Marketplace allows buying and selling applications in 30 countries currently:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom and United States.

Below chart is based on mtiks WP7 app analytics and you can see the top 10 countries based on app usage for the month of February 2011.

Top 10 Devices by App Usage

Top 10 devices based on how frequent the apps are used:

There are over 400,000 applications in Apple’s AppStore alone, so developing and distributing mobile applications appears — at first glance — to be a profitable path for developers and entrepreneurs alike. Among the applications being downloaded, the ratio of free to paid applications is 31:69. The problem facing developers and entrepreneurs, though, is that at least 13% of existing paid apps are pirated and downloaded freely on a daily basis, and 97% of the top 100 apps are regularly pirated! App piracy occurs across mobile platforms, no longer limited to just Apple’s iOS, and is quickly becoming increasingly prevalent on rising platforms like Android and Windows Phone 7.

While some may argue that piracy is simply an extended “try before you buy” period, the idea of a trial period is to allow a user to ultimately buy a product or discontinue its use after a determined period of time. With piracy, the so-called trial period is extended indefinitely, harming both the developer and the overall app eco-system, as many pirated apps are then redistributed again through means like torrents and file hosts that allow users to download bulk packages of pirated apps.

Android is rapidly becoming a prime competitor to Apple’s iOS. Along with its competitiveness as an operating system, it offers a growing variety of applications for its phones. Unlike Apple’s AppStore, however, Android applications are essentially on an open marketplace. This basic distinction between the two means that Apple-based applications are more carefully controlled than Android apps to begin with. Add to that articles like one published last year by Read Write Web about the ease with which hackers can open up Android apps to piracy and to the public to be distributed as free applications.  Similarly, although the WinPhone7 is relatively new to the market, it faces similar issues with piracy of its native apps. One post from wpcentral documents an application called “FreeMarketplace,” which helps users unlock and pirate previously-paid WinPhone7 apps.

Although piracy of mobile apps is on the rise, mtiks has created a solution to help developers control the distribution of their apps and prevent such widespread piracy. To learn more about it, check out our website or email us for more information.

Apple is nearing its 10 billion app download in Jan 2011. Piracy is still a huge problem and it has grown very fast with different repositories and the awareness made by different bloggers and posts online. In several places, people sell jailbroken phones with some of these pirated apps installed. The number of apps are growing more than 120/day as new cracks + updated app version.

We used several stats gathered via our existing platform reading existing apps using mtiks services. Our conversion rates (with mtiks solution, you can apply different techniques to convert unpaid users into paid users) are higher than 10% but it depends on the app too. Also, the average price of paid apps is $3 but 148apps.biz calculated $4 as average pricing.

Also, we have estimated the number of paid apps getting sold as 17% which was reported by Toni Sacconaghi from Bernstein (between 13% – 21%) a year ago but we used the same number for our calculation.

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As shown above, the piracy was half a billion last year and the current piracy loss is in $1.5 billion (estimated). The current rate of growth completely depends upon the appstore downloads but we can see the trend around half a billion every 6 months.

The numbers reveal a lot more potential for app store market and the current trend on piracy. Unlike other mediums, these attempts can be prevented as well as developers can start tracking them to understand their app usage better. Recent news about hacking methods for new Mac AppStore even makes things harder for developers.

This report is following a similar report released last year by 24/7 Wall St.

As of Jan 15, 2011, 148Apps.biz, the app store stats are as follows:

Total Active Apps (currently available for download): 332,230
Total Inactive Apps (no longer available for download): 65,859
Total Apps Seen in US App Store: 398,089
Number of Active Publishers in the US App Store: 68,628

Current Average App Price: $4.07
Current Average Game Price: $1.66
Current Average Overall Price: $2.50

mtiks also keeps track of different major pirated app store repositories. Our current database holds more than 27,000 apps with a higher rate of piracy via Installous app which can be obtained via Cydia installed iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad devices.

Piracy has been bothering iOS developers for the past couple of years after attacks from Hackulous team. An estimated 30% and more has been lost through pirated app users. Installous opened up gates for any average iPhone user with a jailbroken device to get the popular apps for FREE. Hackulous is the team behind Apptrackr and Installous.

Apple will be releasing Mac AppStore on Jan 6, 2011. Hackulous is already way ahead of the game. They will release an App code named Kickback (article here) which will let anyone to buy AppStore paid apps for FREE. This is a bad news for developers again.

Hackulous is also working on another flavor of iOS app Installous which acts like BitTorrent and share paid apps like mp3′s. This will increase the number of apps and participation from any average jailbroken user. This is going to be real bad where we already faced this problem in MP3′s. The way it works right now is that someone has to buy the app and let the hacking community or some app to crack it and publish it via Apptrackr or some repository. This so called Overdrive will make things even worse. Now there is no need for repositories. Every possible jailbroken iPhone or iDevice will have the potential to become a source of piracy.

The trend with Piracy evolved over a period and the progress is a threat to development community. Every marketing effort and quality bring an app to the top 100 which quickly end up with pirated community. Developers or Publishers need to be aware of this and protect their apps from piracy.

Cydia is a directory of applications usable on a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch. It allows anyone to add custom sources to APT. Cydia released Mobile Substrate platform which allows developers to inject code into graphical applications. This is against Apple policy since this uses undocumented API’s. Cydia is fighting with Apple to open it up completely for developers rather than the current restrictions for publishers.

Cydia announced recently that it will release a CydiaSubstrate which is very similar to iOS but will allow cydia community to bring in very interesting apps. The words from Saurik about CydiaSubstrate:

Just like you can make all these modifications on the iPhone, you can make these same modifications on the desktop. Until now, there has never been a way to easily install modifications to the system or third-party applications, as well as keep them updated.

For instance, users that have jailbroken iPhones would like to have a modified version of iTunes that does not ask to update iOS when the device is plugged in, since the update might overwrite jailbreak modifications, Or perhaps you want to change the frequency that TimeMachine performs backups to something other than the stock settings. CydiaSubstrate makes this possible in an easy way that average users could install and update them.

An article: here