“Imagine a huge football stadium filled with fans month after month,” Reichenstein wrote to Ars. In that stadium he writes:
- 5 percent (at most) have a two-week trial pass
- 2 percent have an annual pass
- 0.5 percent have a monthly pass
- 0.5 percent buy “all-time” tickets
But even if every single lifetime ticket buyer shows up at once, that’s 10 percent of the stadium, Reichenstein said. Even without full visibility into every APK, “and what’s happening in China in general,” he wrote, iA can assume that 90 percent of users are “climbing the fence.”
“In a nutshell, this is how you can end up with 50,000 users and only 1,000 paying you,” Reichenstein wrote in a blog post.
Piracy not only means lost revenue, Reichenstein writes, but also increases support requests, feature requests, and the potential for bad reviews from people who never pay. And it builds over time. “You sell fewer apps through (the Play Store), but pirated users keep coming in because pirated sites don’t have the same opinions. Reviews don’t matter much if the app is free.”
The iA numbers for macOS suggest a piracy rate of about 10 percent. on iOS it’s “not 0%” but “very, very hard to tell what the numbers are”; there is also no “reset trick” or trials offered there.
Possible future defrost
Reichenstein wrote in a note to Ars that sharing such numbers could draw criticism from other app developers, both armchair and seasoned. He’s seen it happen Mastodon, Hacking newsand: X (formerly Twitter). But “critical people are helpful,” he noted, and he’s fine with people working backwards to figure out how much iA could have made. (Google did not offer comment on aspects of iA’s post outside of its discussion of Drive’s access policy.)
iA suggests it may bring back Writer on Android, perhaps in a business-to-business scenario with direct payments. For now, it’s a cobblestone in history, albeit one of far less value to the metaphorical Darth Vader who froze it.
