Jailbreakers may find it more difficult to find pirated apps from the App Store thanks to Apple's latest legal maneuvers. The company has reportedly been sending DMCA takedown notices to Apptrackr, a popular service for tracking down cracked apps, in order to try and cut off pirated app downloads at the source.
According to Apptrackr developer "Dissident" (via Cult of Mac), Apple has apparently scraped links from the Apptrackr service and sent "huge takedown notices" to cut off access to pirated apps. To try and work around the copyright issues, Apptrackr has moved its servers outside the US and is using a form of redirection to avoid "direct" links to infringing content.
To what level piracy affects App Store developers remains a matter of debate. Some developers have used checks built in to their apps to determine piracy rates as high as 80 percent. If each pirated copy were counted as a sale, it would add up to a significant amount of money—on the order of millions of dollars given the sales volume of the App Store. Still, every pirated copy doesn't necessarily equal a sale, and many developers don't feel it's worth the effort to work against pirates, many of whom would never have bought the app in the first place.
"Dissident" echoes these sentiments on the Apptrackr website. He claims the service is meant to allow users to test apps before buying, as Apple offers no mechanism to do so via the App Store, but he acknowledged that Apptrackr is often used to simply avoid paying for apps.
"It's undeniable that a portion of our community pirates rather than tests the applications that they install," Dissident wrote on the site's "about us" section. "They were very, very likely never potential customers in the first place. Piracy's conversion rate is absurdly low, and developers know that."
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