Pirated iOS App Store Site Shuts Down 432
A reader writes with this excerpt from CNET: "Installous, a major portal for pirated paid apps from Apple's App Store, won't be around anymore. Development team Hackulous today announced the closure of Installous on their official Web site. As of today, the pirated app store no longer works, and only shows these errors: 'Outdated version. Installous will now terminate' or 'API Error. API unavailable.' For many years, Installous offered complete access to thousands of paid iOS apps for free for anyone with a jailbroken iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. Think of it as being able to walk into a fancy department store, steal anything you want, and never get caught."
Re:Piracy = Theft Analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
If/when we fix copyright laws, then I might respect them more. You want copyrights for software? Five years. You want copyrights for music, books, and movies? Fifteen years. That's it, no more. Software is all but useless from an economic point of view after five years. Works of fiction never lose value, but still, fifteen years. Original research in a scientific field, I might go to 30 years. Genuine R&D, that takes dump truck loads of money? I might go thirty years on that as well.
In today's world, I have zero respect for copyright law.
Re:Cost of Apps (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never understood the desire to pirate apps iOS (or Android/WP) apps. If I'm paying over £500 for the device, then logic dictates that I have enough disposable income to pay the going rate for apps.
One: one of the ways people with disposable income stay that way is by being circumspect about when and where they dispose of said income.
Two: most mobile apps are crap. They either don't work (for the purpose they are desired for) or work poorly, or the purpose turns out to be pointless. Many of those don't have demos available. Piracy provides a try-before-you-buy avenue. Sure, not everyone buys, even if they like the app. But there's still a "legit" reason to want to circumvent the payment system.
Three: Not everything is worth the asking price to everyone. There are apps that a user plans on using extremely rarely for instance. Paying full price for something you might use once a year may not be justified. Sure, you could just do without (that's the legal, strictly honorable way) but if you're in that category, you don't represent a lost sale. Having the pirate version for extreme rare use does nobody harm.
Personally I know I've done #2 a couple times, for $10-$20 utilities. Most of the time the tool doesn't work as I need it to so it gets removed within a couple days. The rest of the time, the creator gets a sale. I may even have one program present Just In Case that I can't justify paying for. If my needs change and it becomes useful to me, I'll direct cash to the creator but for now it's just dead code sitting in a folder, benefiting nobody.
Re:Cost of Apps (Score:0, Interesting)
It does have to do with devices that apple deems obsolete. I jailbroke my iGadget because Apple refused to sell me the next iOS update... so I aquired it in the only way I could. Unfortunately for Apple, that meant not paying them.
Re:Piracy = Theft Analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. Anyone who uses a GPL'd free product should expect that if/when he passes that free item on, he doesn't charge for it.
So that's one software license you take seriously.
But what about people that don't agree? Surely they have as much right as you to ignore the license and do what they like. If they are developing some closed source software for example, why shouldn't they copy code from something GPLed? So long as it fits their personal morality.
Remember, I'm primarily arguing against unbridled corporate greed with my rants against current copyright law
Fine. But this story is about the App Store, where the majority of apps are from independent developers who are charging 99c.
Re:Piracy = Theft Analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
And what do you call it when I insist on $.99 in exchange for being allowed to use the program I wrote and you are using that program and paid me nothing? It cost me time (labor) to write the code, compile the code, go through the checklists to submit to the app stores. I don't work for free. My time is worth something to me. So in a way it is theft. Theft of my time. Time I could have spent earning extra income helping someone with an odd job or time I could have spent going out with friends or even getting a couple extra hours of sleep.
I've had people say to me, "But you should feel proud that people are using your app."
My response is I didn't write that app to get a happy feeling. Happy feelings don't buy coffee. I wrote my apps in the hopes others would find them fun or helpful and in exchange spend a buck that goes towards my coffee fund.
Do I make a lot of money from my apps? I made a little over $8500 last year. It's not replacing my day job yet, but it did buy this laptop and plenty of coffee on the weekends.
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Interesting)
While not condoning software piracy, I don't think it is wise to repeat the myth that "Pirated software is chock-full of malware".
It is true that some pirated software has malware just as it is true that Windows has malware and some apps from the Apple or Android app stores have malware or may spy on you.
The point is that you need to trust the source and not just download random stuff. I don't know about the quality of the software from this web site (I've never heard of it) but presumably if it had malware, this fact would be outed quickly.
Linux and the other Unixes have a big advantage in that they have "repositories" for their software which are controlled and monitored carefully by the authors and the community and any malware is excluded or outed and fixed rapidly.