It's pretty worrying when you hear that someone's blood sweat and tears can be stolen and marketed by a thief.
Plus that there are 'market places' that don't give a hoot and happily carry on with that sort of thing.
I have several questions and perhaps some illuminating ideas about this.
Is wherever the stolen app appears, going to make the thief any money?
It won't (hopefully) be the Google Play Store or Amazon so will the thief actually make any money for all the effort that they've put in to stealing someone else's app?
Yahtzee is a very brilliant idea for an app but it's a one-off, you have the app finished and you sell it.
I'm starting to think that perhaps the only way to go forward in our business is to make something that is not only paid for one time because I have heard of people who have made brilliant apps where it took them a lot of effort then when they sold it they saw a sine curve of purchases that went up then down then stopped.
Look at Google Play's 'subscription' in-app purchase.
I'm looking at incorporating this into my app because of these ideas.
Let's say I make a game called Yahtzee (or I could just steal it
) KIDDING!
Let's say it's my game, my baby, my blood sweat and tears and I release it and people can get it for free and start playing it and oh look in the menu it says 'you can subscribe for more!' and it only costs 1 dollar.
One Dollar?
yep, for a month.
If you subscribe for a dollar then you get all the goodies for that month as the game is constantly in development.
Now, you were originally thinking of selling that one-off app for a couple of dollars weren't you? Hoping that because there are umpteen billion internet users, many of which have Android devices at least a healthy slice of them would buy your app.
Wrong idea.
See, my Yahtzee app is free and you can play it all you want but there is this subscription thing that tempts you all the time with 'extras' that you get when you subscribe and it's real easy see, just choose this option, agree to the terms and you are subscribed for that month for just one dollar.
The basic version will be updated too, a bit, but if you subscribe then you get the extra backgrounds, the extra levels, the extra things that are all current and then when your subscription runs out, don't worry, you can still play but without the extras.
So here is why I see this as the only way forward.
It builds business
Your one-off app is now something that is constantly being worked on and you know why?
Because 1000 of those 10,000 downloads subscribe and suddenly you have 1000 dollars PER MONTH
And that makes you want to keep developing it
and that makes more people want to keep subscribing
and you can do a special offer, 1 year's subscription for 10 dollars (instead of twelve)
I thank you.
btw. the thief can't do that because he doesn't have your brain.
In fact the thief stealing your app is probably only promoting it.
