What’s causing Billion Dollars loss to App Developers?

Piracy has been a constant menace around the globe. The latest addition to this hack was Game of Thrones. The figures are available all over the internet to show the lossesincurred by the makers of the show.

Similar are the app developers who put their sincere effort to deliver a fine product out of their talents but the pirated versions do eat the share of developer’s cake.

Tapcore is a mobile advertising company which has estimated that mobile application development companies and publishers lose about $3-4 billion annually because of the pirated apps. The pirated installs are estimated to be around 14 billion globally each year. The pirated versions are stolen from original creators and then made available on third party app stores websites.

The European and North American don’t have any role in pirated apps installs where there are majorly legitimate downloads from the developer’s locations i.e. Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store. Maximum of pirated apps downloads are recorded in the Chinese mainland and other nations from the third party app stores.

The people are not unaware of these pirated versions of the apps but in some cases the users prefer to use these pirated apps, as cracked games that offer unlimited life, etc. to the user.

An official chat between Tapcore CMO Remco Smit and Forbes executive, CMO said, “For many developers, mobile app piracy is still a bit unknown. We calculate that of the 70 billion installs across alternative apps stores and the $20 billion in revenues they are forecast to generate, 15-20% of the apps will be pirated."

Reflecting from the opinions given by Smit it is around 1/5^th of the market revenues are at stake. The journey of the OSes and their apps has not been very long, around ten years, and a considerable share of their market deals in black.

Stealing an app is not that hard. Begin with downloading the app from the app store and then deconstruct the app. Google’s apps are more prone to mobile piracy. Now the monetization methodology is replaced to earn profit. The hacked app is then uploaded on various third party apps offering sites. The advertisements running on the screens direct profits to hackers.

"This means that the developer community stands to lose between $3 billion and $3.8 billion in revenue per year," says Tapcore CMO.

Smit offers the solution of adding hidden codes inside the apps to identify the situations where the apps are tried to be hacked. There in such a scenario the app even after hack will display the ads which will benefit the original app developer. Also, he offers to vigilante top third party app download sites and then taking legal actions against them for selling pirated versions of their apps.

It is to be noted that the application hackers are no rookies; they are technological professionals and are expert hackers. Smit also says that the app developers stand to lose around $3 billion to $3.8 billion in revenues per year.

Summarizing: It is to be understood that the makers and developers stand to lose great deal because of the pirated versions of their apps. The pirated versions can also be harmful for the users as they may plant infected files in your device.

Such pirated versions of the apps are causing billion dollars loss to every mobile app developer. Building a strong community to act against such piracy will definitely prove to be beneficial.