Dead Trigger in a Facebook statement revealed that piracy on Android was unbelievably high, thus prompting them to make the game free (from earlier price of $0.99)
Dead Trigger App continues to cost $0.99 on iOS.
It is popular enough app with more than 22,000 FB fans. Also at the same time the app seems to be similarly popular on the Google Play Store as well with about 8700 ratings. Then what makes the app so prone to piracy on the Android platform and not iOS?
There might be many reasons for piracy on Android to be very high. One easy one is the fact that the hacking community around Android is pretty active and installing any app from a .apk file is very easy. But is that a good enough justification for “sooo giant” piracy rates? All platforms are hackable, piracy exists and we strongly believe that it is more to do with the user profile rather than how convenient is the payment system or how strong is the security of the platform.
While Android has over 400 million users, a lot of those are low cost or mid-range smartphones. What we mean to imply by that is, a Samsung Galaxy SII (costing Rs 26,000) user is more likely to pay for an app compared to a Galaxy Y (Rs 6900) user. Android has grown in India at a rate of 500% whereas the smartphone market itself isn’t growing as fast. Android is eating into the feature phone market.
The users aren’t buying Android as a smartphone OS but a device that is affordable. They aren’t accustomed to paying for apps, using credit card to buy online or concerned about which version of Android they are running. That is also the reason why many retailers pre-load apps (more often than not pirated ones) on an Android smartphone when selling it. The user profile of an Android buyer demands it.
Adoption is an easier problem to solve, behavior takes time. As cheaper hardware rolls out and pushes feature phones towards extinction, the industry has a task in hand to evolve the user behavior.
That said, some consumers do ask for options:
I guess it’s time the platforms evolve a bit to help evolve the consumer behavior.
