As a developer, what should you do if 85% of the people using your calendar app have pirated it? If you’re Jack Underwood, you give them a taste of a different kind of piracy.
The developer of Today Calendar Pro revealed that unpaid installs of his Android app were much higher than the 50% rate he’d expected, and turned to fellow Reddit users for suggestions about what to do.
“Instead of adding piracy prevention, you should just randomly add pirate themed events to their schedule,” suggested one.
Underwood liked the idea, and shortly afterwards the new feature was implemented, with a “Walk the Plank” event added to the digital diaries of pirate users with a “That’s what ye get for piratin’ matey” message to hammer the point home.
Today Calendar Pro, which costs £3.99 from Android’s Google Play store, has been installed legally between 10,000 and 50,000 times according to the store’s public stats. That suggests anywhere between 57,000 and 283,000 pirate installs.
In a subsequent interview with TorrentFreak, Underwood stressed that he’s not hugely angry at people pirating his app.
“I’m not against piracy, from either a consumer or developer standpoint – I can totally understand why people pirate Today Calendar. They want to try it out for an extended period of time, or they can’t afford to buy it, or they don’t think it’s worth the asking price, and that’s 100% fine with me,” he said.
“Fighting piracy in a traditional way is a waste of time in my eyes, software will get cracked anyway. The majority of people who pirate my apps wouldn’t have bought them anyway, so it’s not as if I’m losing 85% of my revenue. In any event, I’d rather spend that time making Today more awesome.”
Underwood is hoping that the barrage of piratical events will persuade some proportion of the non-paying users to stump up. “The plan is that people will get so bored of being invited to ‘pirate parties’ and being told to walk the plank that they’ll give up and just buy the thing,” he said.
He’s not the first developer to adopt a quirky approach to piracy of his work. In April 2013, the developer of PC strategy game Game Dev Tycoon, which involved players running a games studio, added a feature that crippled pirate players’ virtual businesses – through piracy of their games.
In 2010, Ubisoft assaulted the ears of people playing cracked versions of DS game Michael Jackson: The Experience with blaring vuvuzelas drowning out the music.
In the apps world, Twitter client Tweetbot once tricked pirates into tweeting “I’ve been demoing a pirated copy of @tweetbot and really like it so I’m going to buy a copy,” from cracked versions of its app.
Meanwhile weather app Conditions replaced its real forecasts with a prediction for “ARRmageddon” with 666-degree temperatures for pirated versions.
