Those from AppAdvice stood by words with Dissident, the man who made the world's largest pirated apps site (apptrackr.org), to find out how many of those who jailbreak really install pirated apps. According to it, approximately 40% (ie around 4 million users) of those who jailbreak install the Installous application and download pirated applications through it. At the moment there are over 100 million iDevices in the whole world and according to saurik about 10% of them are jailbroken, and according to Dissident 40% of them download cracked applications. Looking at the numbers, I would say that it is not a large number, on the contrary, we are talking about a piracy rate of only 4%, and this is an enormously small percentage compared to the other 90% who buy applications.
It doesn't stop there. The app which allows you to download these cracked apps free of charge directly on your iDevice, boasts a solid user base as well. Currently, it is installed on more than four million devices and growing. That's about 4% of all iOS users, 40% of jailbroken devices, and yes, that's similar to the number of official downloads of Doodle Jump at the last count.
The dissident motivates his work by the fact that Apple refuses to introduce a system that would allow users to try applications before buying them. Such a system already exists in the Android Market, but Apple refuses to implement it in the AppStore, probably because many users would ask for their money back. Dissident claims that a good part of the hackulo.us community (which constantly supplies the site with pirated applications) uses the site only to try the applications and then buy them if they are really worth the money.
I know for a fact that a good share of our users trial applications, and that's the only reason I continue to work for the community. A very, very considerable portion of our users do so.
Piracy discourages developers from making iPhone applications, and it should not be supported in any way, even if the reasons seem to be quite solid. For foreign developers, the situation is not really that difficult considering that they have many more clients for applications than the number of those who hack them, but for some Romanian developers the situation is not so rosy.
