14 DAY TRIAL // Mobile applications are not safe from piracy. In fact, according to one mobile software developer, some of these apps are more exposed to piracy than any other software.
The assertion comes from Matt Gemmell, who develops applications for iOS devices, and who claims that Google’s Android platform was, in fact, built for piracy.
According to him, one of the main issues with building apps for Android is that you can barely make money out of it.
Applications available for Android are cheap, which makes them accessible to a lot of people, but this might actually be an issue.
Google created the Android platform with an open mentality, he notes. Thus, applications designed for the platform can be easily pirated, which attracts people to doing it.
He also argues that it is rather simple to load pirated applications on an Android device. In fact, there are a lot of tutorials available on the web on how one could do so, all based on the option to “sideload” software on handsets and tablets powered by the OS.
“The system is designed for piracy from the ground up. The existence of piracy isn’t a surprise, but rather an inevitability,” Matt Gemmell notes in a blog post.
The developer continues by saying that developers will eventually flee from Android, and that they will focus on building apps for a bit more closed platforms, such as iOS or Microsoft’s Windows Phone.
He also notes that Google could resolve this issue through locking down the Android platform, though he does not refer to a move similar with the one Apple did with its iOS operating system.
The Internet giant should focus on ensuring that ripping applications would become harder than at the moment, and that users won’t find it that easy to download pirated applications from the web and install them on their devices.
Of course, this does not necessarily mean that this developer is right or that his point of view is similar to that of thousands of other application builders. The fact that Google does need to ensure a lower piracy level for Android applications, however, is real.