91% of Top 100 iPhone games are pirated
iOS (iPhone and iPad) apps are still hot in the industry. There are still a way for someone to pull together a good app and make a decent revenue. It’s been a dominating platform for a while.
mtiks is specialized in piracy audit and anti-piracy solution for iOS apps. We happened to notice a great amount of apps getting pirated these days.
The common myth in this market is to promote an app and take it to the Top 100 listing to make lot of money. It’s partially true that you are not visible for lots of eyes and people buy it a lot. At the same time, this is making the hacker community to target your app for cracking it and distributing it for FREE. Yup, that’s bad. To give you a picture of current list of pirated apps in few populate pirated app stores, we have shows all those categories and their Top 100 apps with results.
Percentage of pirated apps per category from Top 100 (iPhone)
| Books 31% | Business 73% | Education 47% |
| Entertainment 73% | Finance 55% | Games 91% |
| Healthcare 56% | Lifestyle 49% | Medical 30% |
| Music 74% | Navigation 57% | News 44% |
| Photography 74% | Productivity 78% | Reference 50% |
| Social Networking 68% | Sports 35% | Travel 43% |
| Utilities 66% | Weather 44% |
* as of Nov 21
We derived these numbers by looking at 3 of the pirated app stores (among lot more than 10) and tracking the apps pirated and distributed. Do iOS developers need to worry? Of course, yes. As soon as you go into the Top 100 bucket, you have more changes to let your app ends up with pirated app community. The users are not real evil people where they got an easy access to use these illegal apps with less effort and guilt. Find out current percentage anytime at http://www.mtiks.com.