App Store piracy costs an estimated $450 million
Equates to $140 million losses for Apple
The Wall Street Journal has been crunching figures for the number of paid applications on the App Store since its launch in July of 2008, and deduced that a piracy rate of 75 per cent equates to losses of $450 million for the development community.
While it doesn't make clear where the average piracy rate of 75 per cent comes from (some games have reported higher figures, though the estimated number of jailbroken handsets is only around 6 per cent) it tallies up at a whopping 1.53 billion pirated downloads.
Of this figure, around $140 million is in losses suffered by Apple when it doesn't reclaim its 30 percent of revenues from developer profits, though the report also points out how little Apple has done to address the piracy issue.
Indeed, Apple proves to be something of a roadblock for anti-piracy measures as it refuses to allow developers to encrypt their code.
