iPhone App Piracy

Over 9 months after it's been gone from the App Store, one of our apps is being pirated more than it ever sold.

We released the first version of our iPhone "strip poker" app, Poker vs Girls in June of 2009 (really based on the App Store limitations, it would have been better described as bikini poker, but strip poker sounds better! Improved marketing for our poker games was the whole idea.) After a lot of tries, the 2.0 version was accepted in early December 2009.

Version 1.0 had an little banner ad spot at the top, so we could promote our other apps. Version 2.0 needed more space, so we removed it. No legitimate purchasers have gotten that version 1.0 since December 2009. In fact the entire app was removed from the App Store in February 2010 as part of Apple's big sexy-app-purge.

For the past 10 days, a year after the version with the ad was last available, that ad page got over 32,000 unique views according to Google Analytics. That is more than the total number of copies sold the entire time it was in the App Store--22,935. (And doing the past 3 months, it's over 280,000 unique views--more than 10x the total sold.)

All 100% piracy* (Yeah, a couple could be people who bought, never upgraded, and are still playing...but there can't be many of them--say 99.9% piracy.)

The good news...we can show ads to all those people pirating it. And the poker game itself is still there and better than before (bluetooth games, etc.) For iPhone. For iPad.