“Picture a massive football stadium filled with fans month after month,” Reichenstein wrote to Ars. In that stadium, he writes:
- 5% (max) have a 2-week-free trial ticket
- 2% have a yearly ticket
- 0.5% have a monthly ticket
- 0.5% are buying “all-time” tickets
But even if every lifetime ticket buyer showed up at once, that’s 10% of the stadium, Reichenstein said. Even without full visibility of every APK—”and what is happening in China at all,” he wrote—iA can assume 90% of users are “climbing over the fence.”
“Long story short, that’s how you can end up with 50,000 users and only 1,000 paying you,” Reichenstein wrote in the blog post.
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.”
The iA numbers on macOS hint at a roughly 10% piracy rate. On iOS, it’s “not 0%,” but it’s “very, very hard to say what the numbers are”; there is also no “reset trick” or trials offered there.
A possible future unfreezing
Reichenstein wrote in the post and to Ars that sharing these kinds of numbers can invite critique from other app developers, both armchair and experienced. He’s seen that happening on Mastodon, Hacker News, and X (formerly Twitter). But “critical people are useful,” he noted, and he’s OK with people working backwards to figure out how much iA might have made. (Google did not offer comment on aspects of iA’s post outside discussing Drive access policy).
iA suggests that it might bring back Writer on Android, perhaps in a business-to-business scenario with direct payments. For now, it’s a slab of history, albeit far less valuable to the metaphorical Darth Vader that froze it.
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