Dear iPhoneCrackDetector

Attention readers: you may have noticed a lack of posting around here. It's because of those damn hackers and their DDOS. As such I have been offline and studiously building a fallout shelter in my backyard.

Anyway I found this in my Inbox a few days ago:

"Dear iPhoneCrackDetector,

I have been following your blog for a few weeks and been checking for the Info.plist crack even before you mentioned it. You're [sic] methods of being subversive have helped me well and I have been tracking usage for sometimes [sic]. I seen [sic] that your daughter ratted you out to her cracker friends so as a gift I will show you my usage statistics for my application ******* ********.

You're [sic] friendly iPhone Developer,
[redacted]

ps I hope my grammer [sic] and spelling are good enough for you! My graphs also don't track my paid users because I'm a nice guy!"

Ok. I'm not going to nitpick on the grammar and spelling so much, [redacted], but I will post your graphs (slightly edited to remove incriminating evidence) since they are very enlightening.

This is an eleven day run which tracks application execution. As you can see [redacted]'s application gets fairly constant usage per day.

Ok. Over a span of eleven days, [redacted]'s application has been copied at least 260 times. If you count the bars, you'll sum up to 260 but his graph title says 263. In either case, I say at least because these are the suckers that fell into the Info.plist detection trap.

[redacted] didn't give me enough statistics in his first correspondence to me, so I asked him for minimum, maximum and average usage over the eleven days he sent me. I also asked for his total number of sales for the 11 days and here's what he said:

"Hey iPhoneCrackDetector,

Minimum uasge is 1 for the eleven days. 12 pirates installed ******* ******** and ran it once. Maximum usage is 32 by 5 pirates. Next highest maximum is 29 by 52 pirates. Average usage is 7 runs per pirate.

My daily reports show 574 sales for those 11 days.

[...]"

HOLY FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When I read this I immediately divided 260 into 574. This yielded 45.296%.

Unfortunately my math was wrong. Over the total number of downloads (260 + 574) then the piracy yield is really: 260 / (260 + 574) = 31.175%.

This is still not a number to be scoffing at.

Given that most of the pirated copies are in constant use then I'm pretty sure running an application on average 7 times a day for 11 days is beyond the intent of the "trial period" that some of the lead crackers in the jailbreak/cracker scene are advocating.

So what do you do?

I suggest to you [redacted] that you stop developing for the App Store. 31.175% of your users are lying, cheating, scummy bastards. Another suggestion is to increase your application price. Store owners do it to counter shoplifting, so I suggest you do it too. Your new customers will be subsidizing the pirates who use their copies for free, but hey, put it this way... your existing customers won't have to pay anything.