Piracy In The iPhone Community. Shocking Stats!

Whilst trawling through some tweets and other general sites, I picked up quite a bit of info in regards to piracy within the iPhone jailbreak community itself. But are we all in it for unlocks and free / pirated apps and tweaks?This comes from a tweet by i0n1c, where after a spate of tweets about the community he said "After all, most JB users are only in it for running unlocks and pirating apps" Don't get me wrong, i0n1c is an amazing hacker on the IOS side of things, but is what he says true?

I know that a lot of people ARE obviously in it for the 'free apps', heck, when I first jailbroke my phone......I done exactly that. But the novelty of that soon wears off pretty quick, and now I DO have a good few apps that I paid for. So with the appstore reaching 25BILLION downloads in just a few years, I personally don't think piracy IS much of a problem regarding IOS apps.

Another one that caught my attention was by a Tweak Developer in Cydia named Filippo Bigarella (developer of Springtomize and Cleverpin). He points out to us how bad pirating is within Cydia! Here's the download rates for HIS Springtomize 1.3:

  Legit :  8.08%
  Pirates :  91.92%

There is more stats showing which IOS had most and which type of iDevice had Pirates (iPhone 4 had most with IOS 5,0) but this does go to show that Piracy isextremelybad, from the people even on our own side. And this figures shown were from around 200,000 installs of the tweak......92%was pirated copies. I can guarantee that this figures are much the same for MANY ofthe other 'recommended' Cydia tweaks.

Again, I myself, once upon a time installed pirated tweaks in Cydia. As time goes on, the novelty wears off. And to get the good updates you want to have the 'paid' version.

Very well known developer Ryan Petrich tweeted as a response to the figures "20:1 piracy rates are not unheard of, but it's not really a problem. most pirates cannot purchase anyway" So developers seemingly ARE aware of the amount of piracy that will happen, but just have to deal with it.

A quote i read : "Its a shame, and for that reason jailbreaking will always have a black eye"

So whats your opinion? I think that the majority of people who have jailbroken iDevices do it for a lot more than JUST pirating apps and tweaks. I love changing my phone with themes and tweaks (and there are plenty of good freeones out there). Do you think that these developers should be charging for the tweaks and themes? Or should they just have donations? Afterall, the hackers that make this possible (pod2g, geohot, the Chronic and dev-teams, i0n1c) don't charge for the jailbreaks THEY develop to make this all possible in the first place, they ask for a donation (The Dev-Team are the exception...asking for NOTHING).

In other scenes, like the PS3, NOT ONE developer of any homebrew app or program asks for you to purchase what they have made, although the majority of them would accept donations for the time they have spent for YOUR enjoyment. There are At least 2 groups i can think of that DO charge for products though. These are the TrueBlue dongle and the JB King dongle (they have to make their money back somehow after making dongles) but why nobody has made these a .pkg for CFW yet...I couldn't say.

Thoughts? Are any of you legit tweak buyers out there? As the Jailbreak community grows...will the Piracy along with it?

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