A new report from the Yankee Group says that Android piracy is a major problem, Google isn’t doing enough to help police it and that this is having a material impact on developers’ bottom line.
“Android apps are living in the Wild West without a sheriff,” said Carl Howe, Yankee Group director of research and author of the report “Android Piracy: How Republished Apps Steal Revenue and Increase Costs,” in a prepared statement. “With five other major mobile OSs competing for consumer dollars, Google can’t afford to simply let pirates kill app developers’ businesses. They need to foster some law and order or developers will flee to other platforms and Android will lose customers.”
I’m not going to go crazy about this yet because it seems some of the findings may be a bit flawed, as it’s based on a Skyhook survey that only had 75 respondents. While some Android developers said that piracy has cost them up to $10,000, it’s unclear if that’s representative of the developer ecosystem as a whole.
But I do speak to many developers on a daily basis and I use Android phones alongside my iPhone 4 and it’s easy to see that money is still primarily with iOS in the app space. Many companies that are going mobile will still go iOS first, then Android and there’s because there has been a clear ROI and Apple has paid out billions to developers.
That’s not to say that Android development isn’t worth the time and effort, as Google has done a much better job in giving app makers better tools and the redesigned Android Market should help with content discovery. Still, it is insanely easy to pirate Android apps, so you just have to hope that Google, handset makers and carriers make the experience good enough to keep people off the torrent sites.
[Via Yankee Group]