Some apps being pirated at rates as high as 95%

While this is in no way indicative of the App Store in general, one app developer is seeing his application pirated an astounding 95% of the time.  Bram Stolk‘s ‘the little tank that could’(iTunes) has been downloaded only 45 times but over 1000 users have shown up on his leaderboard.

My game has an online leader board. The players with the best times show up on a ranking. The leader board is consulted when you play the game, so that it can be displayed on the phone. When I took a look at my server logs, I was absolutely astonished. There were 1114 different people in the logs!

So how can a game that sold 45 copies, have 1114 players? That does not make any sense? I have no reason to believe that Apple’s sales reports are faulty, so the answer is piracy. Very quickly after the release of ‘the little tank that could’ the game got cracked, and distributed via torrents. Those crackers are a weird bunch, even taking pride in their work. Proudly tagging my game with ‘cracked by Hexhammer’.

Might want to turn the sound down if you are at work

This information comes as more and more iPhone users and developers are heading into the Jailbroken Cydia Store for seemingly benign apps like Cycorder for video recording on pre 3GS models and Google Voice Apps like GVMobile.  

Cydia’s developer claims that about 4 million, or 10 percent of the 40 million iPhone and iPod Touch owners to date, have installed Cydia. On a recent day, he said 470,000 people were connecting to the Cydia store, up from 350,000 per day just a few months ago. Among many free apps, there are also 15 paid apps in Cydia, and the store has earned $220,000 in overall sales in just five months.

Apple believes Jailbreaking is illegal under the DMCA.