Very early in Pinch Media’s life, I got an angry phone call from one
of our users – the stats, he said, were completely off. We audit our
analytics for accuracy regularly, so this surprised me – but we could
clearly see that the analytics were nothing like the sales figures.
The developer had installed the code correctly. The data coming back
to the servers all looked 100% legitimate. Eventually (after a lot of
troubleshooting) we figured it out – the data was legitimate, and
Apple’s sales figures were equally legitimate. The application had
been cracked and distributed illegally, and Pinch Analytics was
correctly detecting the users of the cracked application.
That’s become a very familiar situation for developers of paid
applications. Often we’ve been the bearers of bad news. A developer
releases their application, watches their stats intently, sees a big
spike in application usage from Pinch Analytics, celebrates – and then
the sales report from Apple comes, and they see nothing has changed.
As the small cracking community built out better distribution
mechanisms, we’ve seen the usage spike from the initial day of theft
grow larger. Today, certain applications are stolen twenty times as
often as they’re legitimately purchased. Theft of three-to-four times
daily sales is typical.
There’s been a lot of debate about application piracy in the developer
community. Views range from ‘this is a simple way to try before you
buy which should have been in the AppStore anyway, and is therefore
understandable and potentially even profitable’ to ‘this is simple
theft, which directly impacts developer revenue.’ Many questions have
been raised about pirate behavior - where they’re from, how they use
applications, whether they go on to buy applications, and so on.
There’s also been some debate about the nature of the jailbroken
community – whether jailbreaking is primarily a way to add additional
functionality to your phone or just a prerequisite for piracy.
To answer all of these questions, Pinch Media has added jailbroken
phone and pirated application detection to its analytics library and
reports. Developers can now see how many users are running their
application on jailbroken phones and how many users are running
cracked copies of their applications, and draw their own conclusions.
Developers can also see application usage patterns, so they can
determine whether pirates use their applications more or less than
their other users. Finally, we’ve taken pirated installations out of
our sales estimates, so they more accurately reflect your real
revenue. If you’ve installed a recent version of our analytics
library (r24 or later) in your application, you’ve already got the
stats waiting for you in your account.
Here’s some screenshots of our new functionality: (more…)
