"Chiuso è meglio per il business" così chiude il suo controverso articolo un programmatore di professione: Matt Gemmell.Secondo il ragazzo di Edinburgo il sistema di Google, la semplicità con cui si posso bypassare i controlli e quindi "crackare" le app di Android non sono un buon compromesso per poter pensare di fondare un obiettivo remunerativo solido a confronto del sistema della casa di Cupertino.
I read earlier this week about a developer who made their Android version free after the $1 game was extensively pirated. Stories like this come as no surprise, but the industry press rarely deals with the core problem - and nor does Google.
I know a guy here in Edinburgh (a friend of a friend). He’s a nice guy. Runs his own business just as I do, and he’s a developer just as I am. We often end up chatting in the pub when we’re out in a large group. He has a bit of an “iOS is evil because it’s closed-source” thing going on, and likes to evangelise Android. It takes exactly one Jerry Maguire quote to chasten him (and bring a flush to his face) every time: show me the money.
People like to throw around figures about Android’s handset penetration. Yes, Android is on a lot of devices. That’s lovely. But the real question is: as a developer, can you make money from it?
If you’re not in the mobile apps business to make money, then great - congratulations. This is your bus stop. Off you go. Have a nice life. I, however, am in business to make money. I write code because I like doing that, but the business part is about making money. Otherwise I’d be a hobbyist, and I’d be doing something else during the day. I’m thrilled to be able to do something I enjoy as a business, and I’m doubly thrilled to do it from the comfort of my own home.
Whilst the aforementioned story about the Android game didn’t surprise me, it did horrify me. Android is designed to be difficult to make money from, and the core issue is that it’s open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness.
Designed for piracy
I previously wrote about the threshold of frustration at which piracy becomes easier than buying, but that’s not the case here. Buying an app on the Android Market is substantially similar to how you buys apps on iOS: you search, find the app, click Buy, confirm, and it downloads. It’s not an unduly onerous process, and certainly not a barrier to the business model. This isn’t piracy due to frustration.It also wasn’t about price; the game was one dollar. Many iOS developers feel that the App Store is crippled with a race-to-the-bottom mentality, pricing apps far below a reasonable, sustainable value level. That’s absolutely true. Shame on you for pricing at $0.99 to chase the kind of customers who, well, think a dollar is anything but a trivial, throwaway amount of money that won’t even remotely get you a reasonable cup of coffee. Get some self-respect. Quit encouraging bad behaviour, and ruining the party for everyone else.
A price-tag of one dollar is passive smoking. You’re killing people around you, for your own short-term benefit. But again, that wasn’t the case here. It wasn’t piracy due to a high price. Instead, this was the endemic casual piracy of convenience.
If you don’t already know how to install pirated software on your Android device, here’s a tutorial on how to “sideload” Android apps (in practice, as with most articles that mention “backups” of software from nebulous sources, this is a tutorial about piracy).
Pretty easy. You search the internet for pirate copies of apps, then copy them onto your (regular, unrooted, non-“jailbroken”) device, and launch them. The system is designed for piracy from the ground up. The existence of piracy isn’t a surprise, but rather an inevitability.
