iPhone App piracy: Small time developers feel the pinch

[javajolt]

Around $21,000 has been lost in potential sales due to cracked copies of Layers

Cracked iPhone applications freely available online are restricting the growth and potential of small-time developers particularly as they struggle to make a living in difficult economic times.

That's the findings of Macworld over recent weeks after speaking to several developers, some of whom are seeing just one legit sale compared ten pirated downloads.

Typical of the problem is Ben Gotow of Gotwo.net, who while still an undergraduate in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt University, created the well received Layers for iPhone and iPod touch.

Layers is a natural media painting application, which offers artists, designers, illustrators and digital dabblers a way to create drawings and paintings on their iPhone with up to five layers using a choice of eight high-quality brushes, a full range of colour and transparency tools and full undo support. Once you're done drawing and painting, you can email your work as a PSD file with the layers intact.

The £2.99 application has sold relatively well but after a search following a Google Alert for "Layers for iPhone." and a chat with a tech journalist, Ben found his hard work was freely available on a website alongside thousands of cracked applications. The database showed a cracked version of Layers including 1.0, 1.1 and 1.3 updates had been downloaded more than 9,000 times.

"I was pretty shocked. I figured piracy would be a small issue since the jailbreaking community is estimated to be a few million phones at most," said Ben. "I debated a couple of ways of locking down cracked copies of the app, but in the end I decided to make the process of phoning home unobtrusive and give pirated users full access to the app."

Layers: Pirated vs. legitimate downloads in the last 30 days.

Recently with Layers phoning home, Ben has been able to determine the number of legit sales each month compared to pirated copies installed on iPhones and iPod touches. The young developer believes that around $21,000 has been lost in potential sales due to cracked copies of Layers being available, although perhaps only 10 per cent of that figure would actually legitimately pay for the application. Clearly for Ben, and others, piracy is not good for business, and also discorages all but 99¢/59p applications on the Apple iTunes App Store.

"I don't think Apple does enough to limit app piracy. Until recently, the iPhone marketplace was heavily biased toward 99¢ apps, and it made it difficult to justify the development of a complex application. While they've corrected the store by adding a list of "Top Grossing" apps, piracy is still making it difficult for developers to write expensive apps."

"Piracy does affect the bottom line. Building "Layers" was a major undertaking, and it's difficult to justify complex apps when piracy rates are so high. The market for painting tools on the iPhone is pretty small, and every sale helps justify the cost of development," insists Ben.

"I really enjoy writing iPhone apps and I've considered doing it full-time after graduation this spring. Cutting down piracy would probably boost sales and would help justify a career move in that direction."

Available from the Apple iTunes App Store > http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/download/?itmsUrl=itms%3A%2F%2Fax.itunes.apple.com%2FWebObjects%2FMZStore.woa%2Fwa%2FviewSoftware%3Fid%3D322043687%26mt%3D8%26tduid%3D39625d631a5396f403377a9dbb45ae2c%26affId%3D1503186%26ign-mscache%3D1

Layers costs £2.99 and requires the iPhone 3.0 Software Update. Macworld's review of Layers is here.http://www.macworld.co.uk/ipod-itunes/reviews/index.cfm?reviewid=3591&pagtype=allchandate

[javajolt]

review of Layers

Get creative on your iPhone, have Hi-Res JPEG or PSD files emailed to you

Manufacturer: Gotow.net
Pros: Good set of tools, support for multiple layers, 30-level undo/redo stack, ability to export files, sync options to transfer artwork wirelessly to Mac.
Cons: Some minor image bugs need to be addressed.
Min specs: iPhone and iPod touch, iPhone 3.0 Software Update or later.
Price: £2.99
Star rating:

Another in the line of painting apps for the iPhone and iPod touch, Layers from Gotow.net delivers a long-awaited and powerful option - the ability to create multiple layers. Ben Gotow developed and fine-tuned this £2.99 app using feedback from hundreds of mobile artists, which becomes evident as you go through some of its features.

Support for multiple layers gives you much more control and opens up many more possibilities for your creations. For instance, you can import a picture from your camera roll and use the eraser tool to selectively reveal portions of an underlying picture to create photo compositions. Or you can paint in backgrounds without having to carefully paint around subjects already on the canvas.

Layers supports up to five layers at any one time in your painting, and if you find you need another, there’s the option to merge down and free up space for a new one. Tapping the Layers button switches to a 3-D view of all the layers where you can select them or drag and drop to rearrange their order in the stack. Also, you can fill, delete, merge down, duplicate, or add new layers.

Layers has a clean and simple interface that moves off-screen when you start painting and comes back with a slight shake of the device. You can zoom from 55 to 1,000 percent using the pinch gestures; a quick double tap on the canvas automatically zooms in on that particular area.

You can paint in virtually any colour with sliders to adjust transparency as well as how light or dark the colour is. A nice eye dropper tool lets you select any colour on either the current layer only or all layers - you access that tool with a tap-and-hold.

Eight natural media brushes range from hard or soft circles to scattered dots, which make painting hair or adding textures easier. Each brush can be sized from very large to just one pixel for fine detail work. The brushes are impressive enough, but there’s the possibility of new brush packs in future updates.

In the here-and-now, an eraser tool supports transparency and works using any brush. Layers offers a 30-level undo/redo stack that saves when you stop editing your painting for whenever you resume working on it.

You can also export your creation as a PSD file complete with layers through an in-app e-mail feature. Or you can opt to save the image to your camera roll, duplicate a painting, or e-mail it as a JPEG. All of your masterpieces are stored in the gallery, which has preview thumbnails that can be re-sized via a slider at the bottom of the screen.

A Sync button allows you to wirelessly save Hi-Res copies (up to 4,096x4,096) of your paintings to your desktop, as well as create Quicktime playback movies of them being painted stroke by stroke. There’s just one catch to this feature - it requires using the Replay Viewer which only works on a Mac running OSX 10.5 and above. Gotow.net is working on a Web service that will allow you to upload paintings to the Layers server, with Hi-Res JPEG or PSD files emailed to you.

I did discover one bug when importing photos into Layers that occasionally distorted or randomly cropped the image. The developer is aware of this and says it will be fixed in the next update. Also coming soon: the ability to set the transparency of entire layers.

Layers is compatible with any iPhone or iPod touch running the iPhone 3.0 software update.

Macworld Buying Advice

With its support for multiple layers and the ability to export PSD files (among other features), Layers is an excellent app. The developer is very responsive and seems dedicated to listening to the users and adding requested features, making the future of Layers really bright.