cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/16408366
Guessing they don’t pray. Star Wars reference aside, learning about rampant Android piracy really made be rethink the pay devs receive for their effort. Per Business of Apps:
- Consumers spent $47 billion on Google Play apps and games in 2023
- Over 113 billion apps and games were downloaded on Google Play last year
- 2.61 billion apps and games are available to download on Google Play
- The top grossing app on Google Play in 2023 was Google One, a cloud storage service Instagram was the most downloaded app on Google Play last year, with 521 million downloads
The rest of the report is paywalled, so the number I was curious about – MAUs (ideally DAUs, but that’s a lot of time in Calc) for paid apps with at most 10,000 downloads – is probably out there, but it’s a Beehaw post. That report was the only result on DDG’s first page relevant to the query “google play store apps by downloads.”
All this to say, Apple’s 30% and, well, walled garden that covers piracy to a sufficient extent is starting to look like the better choice for my next phone. And I have been an ardent avoider of Apple products since college.
I buil(t) my rigs, with every component suited to my needs (or budget; YMMV – winning an i7-8086K gave me a lot of breathing room on the GPU side), but my life on a 24VDC electrical system has convinced me that a laptop need to replace my rig, and Apple seems to have my needed “lots of power with incredible battery life” nailed. But I now have to pick a final product that I didn’t build and thus have no idea how to troubleshoot a hardware problem.
Except, I’m a light gamer, building factories and such. Being on ARM doesn’t work.
I don’t want to be in the iPhone-x86 crowd. Most things are doable, but hardly seamless. But giving up Factorio is a bridge too far.
I’m no longer seduced by Google’s lie that app makers are rolling in the dough when it’s actually slave wages supporting freeloaders. Sure, this is only one example, but as the issue is with Google policy, it’s likely representative. That’s why I wanted to see the figures.
Part of me thinks this rant could have also worked in Politics. 🤣
They wanted full access to the user’s Google Drive. That’s a permission Google is very reluctant to hand out because some users (perhaps unwisely) store large amounts of sensitive information there, and very few apps actually need direct access.
Even if an editor app needs access to arbitrary files on Google Drive that it did not create, it can use the Android file picker. This seems like a case of an app developer failing to follow the good practice of minimizing permissions. I have complaints about Google and the Android ecosystem, but having high requirements for unrestricted access to Google Drive is not one of them.
I mean, from the sound of it, it sounds more like a poor choice of backend tech (syncing via Google Drive instead of your own server + allowing exports elsewhere) + an unwillingness to actually get certified for the required security.
In theory, as a user, we should not at all dislike companies having to jump through more hoops to proof they’re not shitting our stuff out every orifice the moment we close an app. Of course, it being synced to Google Drive is essentially just that so I feel the added security requirements are a weeeeee bit misguided here.
But I also don’t get why a developer would do that in the first place. It’s such a weird ghetto way of syncing your stuff to just copy a file around Google Drive. It’s what I do (well, with Onedrive) to have a synced FFXIV user settings folder. 😅 I expect professionals to do better than that, basically.
it sounds more like a poor choice of backend tech (syncing via Google Drive instead of your own server + allowing exports elsewhere)
I’d rather sync to Google Drive than some weird home grown service. My expectation (probably unfounded, but whatever) is that Google Drive is likely to exist for a while and, when it folds, I’m likely to have a couple of months to get my crap out of there. I’d feel less confident about some rando service from a company I’ve never heard of.
In theory, as a user, we should not at all dislike companies having to jump through more hoops to proof they’re not shitting our stuff out every orifice the moment we close an app.
I think the complaint is that there’s a heavyweight validation process (pay KPMG), a stupid review process from Google (suggesting a writing app should use read only access), and 90% of users aren’t paying for the app.
The last one is clearly the most important, since a robust income stream would justify the other problems.
I’ve seen a bunch of developers complain that piracy is rampant on Android. As in this case, the ongoing cost of pirates outweighs the income from paying users.
It’s shitty.
The only cost from piracy is opportunity cost.
Anyway, I didn’t see anyone in your post that supports the idea that piracy is rampant.
The developer mentioned in the article complains about a:
worsening struggle with red tape, [other stuff], and rampant piracy
The article goes on to describe some of the costs of piracy to the developer:
Piracy doesn’t just mean lost revenue, Reichenstein wrote, but also increased demands for support, feature requests, and chances for bad ratings from people who never pay. And it builds over time. “You sell less apps through the [Play Store], but pirated users keep coming in because pirate sites don’t have such reviews. Reviews don’t matter much if the app is free.”
Bad reviews for pirated apps sounds like a stupid excuse.
Last I knew you couldn’t leave a review unless you visited the play store app page from the active Google account you installed and bought the app from.
