How iPhone “jailbreaking” is fueling app piracy
Tonight on Channel 4 News, I’m looking at the growing threat of mobile phone application piracy and examining how it’s starting to affect the lives of app developers.
The iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad have popularised the concept of mobile apps and there are almost a quarter of a million available in the Apple App store. Some are free, but many cost anything ranging from 59p to hundreds of pounds.
Successful apps, such as FatBooth (which takes a photograph of a face and makes its fatter) have made their developers rich. Apple takes 30 per cent of the revenue from sales of apps and it’s one of the most profitable parts of its business.
To protect that revenue and, they say, to prevent viruses from finding their way onto your device, all iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads are locked so you can only download apps from its official App store. It also prevents viruses from infecting their devices.
There is a way around this, through “jailbreaking”, which effectively unlocks your device, allows you to download apps that Apple haven’t approved but, crucially, also download pirate applications. Now not everyone who jailbreaks their Apple product is doing so to illegally download pirated applications, some simply want to customise their phone or to access non approved applications. But because it is only possible to download pirated applications if you have a jailbroken phone, it is fair to say everyone who pirates iPhone applications is necessarily a jailbreaker.
There’s been considerable debate as to whether jailbreaking your iPhone is legal. The US Copyright Office (and subsequently the Library of Congress) has ruled that breaking Apple’s grip on their products is “fair use”. Apple does warn that jailbreaking your product can invalidate your warranty but that hasn’t stopped an estimated five million people from doing just that.
Now while piracy of apps does affect big corporations, TomTom’s £44.99 application being a favorite of app pirates. What’s so significant about this new type of piracy is the impact on very small companies or individual developers.
The beauty of Apple’s App Store is that app creators get a great distribution system and can reach the market much more easily that they possibly could before. I met Tak Fung, who sold over 150,000 copies of his first app MiniSquadron. Priced between 99p and 1.79, it’s been a big money maker. Last week, he launched a new game called Epic Win, but within minutes of it being on sale, Tak found pirate copies of the game all over the internet.
This is different to traditional piracy, which tends to affect big film, music or software companies. In this instance the iPhone pirates are stealing from people just like themselves. “I’m just this guy who is sitting in this bedroom and I made this game with no funding and I require these people’s support to survive,” Tak told me.
“It’s sometimes hard to blame them because they’re not educated to know it’s not a big corporation, a faceless company, it’s just me in my bedroom.”
Some 10 per cent of the 50 million iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads are believed to have been jailbroken. Last week, Apple updated their software to close the hole that allowed the JailBreakMe website to crack the lock on Apple devices with one simple click.
But as Apple’s update will only come into effect when users voluntarily update their operating system, the JailBreakMe system is still unlocking thousands of devices a day and there will no doubt soon be a hole found within Apple’s latest operating system.
It’s clear that piracy will grow on these devices and perhaps that developers need to update their business model to reflect this. You can, for instance, download The Sun’s iPad application illegally, but after 30 days of usage, you are forced to make an “in app” payment in order to continue to read the newspaper.
Without completely re-writing the application, it doesn’t appear possible for pirates to use that particular app in the long run. Games developers may charge credits to unlock particular levels or to add to the attributes of an avatar, while giving their application initially away for free.
There are 6 comments on this post
I’ve considered unlocking my iPhone, but only because of the ridculous restrictions that stop you using already purchased music as ringtones. Downloading illegal material no matter who developed it, unless it’s already free, is theft – simples!
There’s no excuse for this thieving behavior. Worthless… Losers… A menace to society.
This was a very poorly researched and unbalanced article that, on top of having misconstrued an entire community of users as being part of a single subgroup, has also mischaracterized the impact of piracy on the lives of developers.
Seriously: as someone who sells my own applications… hell, as someone who runs an entire marketplace for selling the applications of hundreds of other developers, I seriously allocate /no/ time to fighting piracy. Why? Because the people pirating my apps aren’t going to pay for them.
Think about it: these are people who are willing to spend umpteen hours of their lives first finding out how to steal apps, then modifying their system to steal the app, getting a modified version of the app itself, and then maintaining this entire mess as the system and the app are updated… all in the name of saving a dollar or two.
As the adage claims, time equals money, and these users apparently have a per-hour value approximating zero. You have to ask yourself why that is, and the answer truthfully is “because these people don’t have money” (many of them are actually 13), and people without money are never going to buy your apps no matter how much DRM…
I totally agree with Jay this was a poorly researched article the people who make the jailbreak such as comex and of course Jay Dont host these apps
Jailbreaking is perfectly LEGAL. 99% of Jailbreakers DO NOT use cracked or illegal apps. This story is EXTREMELY misleading.
Channel 4 seems to have confused jailbreaking (the process of allowing non-authorised applications to be installed, rather than using Apple’s walled garden approach) with piracy (copying, distributing and installing applications against the wishes of the software creator).
I have a jailbroken iPhone – and it’s not so that I can pirate apps. The reason my phone is jailbroken is simple – I want to use an alternative music player (Spotify) whilst I’m tracking my exercise progress (with Runkeeper). That requires multi-tasking and Apple doesn’t allow multitasking on my iPhone 3G but I can make it work using a simple jailbreak and an application called Backgrounder.
Whilst it may be possible to use jailbroken phones for piracy, jailbreaking does not equal piracy. If I was so inclined, I could run unlicensed copies of Windows on my PC, or install an unlicensed copy of Adobe Photoshop on my Mac, but I don’t hear national broadcasters suggesting that all Windows or Mac users are software pirates.
(full feedback available at http://www.markwilson.co.uk/blog/2010/09/jailbreaking-does-not-equal-piracy.htm )