I’ve been reading several articles recently where developers and publishers are complaining about the “rampant piracy” on the iPhone and iPod Touch platforms.  The developers say that they are seeing high score submissions from a far higher number of players than they’ve sold copies of the game.  They say that this fact proves the other players are playing pirated copies, and they further blame Apple for this situation.  As it turns out, they are right about Apple’s culpability, but not in the way they thought.

While I certainly don’t dispute that piracy exists on this platform, it seems to me that these developers are missing a very key point, which they may well not even be aware of.  When you sell an app for $0.99, you as the developer get $0.70 from Apple, however, even if there was zero piracy you may only be earning $0.14 from each user that is using your app or playing your game!  “How can that be?”, you ask!

It is because Apple’s distribution policy allows users to install your app or game on up to 5 iDevices of their choice from a single paid copy! I received a support email recently from a player indicating that his entire family has our game, Charmed, installed on their 5 iDevices.

So far I have not seen any indication that the piracy estimates have included this fact in any way, so it stands to reason that they would then grossly overestimate the amount of piracy that is going on.

In a completely scientific survey of 20 of my friends and coworkers that own iPhones and iPod Touches, exactly one of them has a jailbroken device, and he only did it to be able to develop stuff that Apple won’t let him do with the normal Software Development Kit.  Furthermore, most of them didn’t even know what jailbreaking was or how to do it even if they had heard of it.

Of course I am joking about the scientific validity of this survey, but I just don’t believe that the vast majority of iPhone and iPod Touch users care enough to bother jailbreaking their devices.

So the statistics for piracy are likely very much lower than the 90% that others have estimated.  Besides, as my good friend Homer Simpson says people can come up with statistics to prove anything!  Forty percent of all people know that!