iOS app piracy skyrockets

Scene

The Apple app cracking scene meanwhile continues to flourish.

Hackulous, the nerve centre of the cracking effort, has over approximately five years evolved from a private network into a slick public repository that serves many millions of visitors.

Installous

In a token anarchic chat room, users post links to cracked apps and request help to reverse engineer others, while moderating Hackulous founders sit by.

In other areas, the founders organise into committees and schedule meetings to discuss the future of Hacklous, its goals, structure and what information should and should not be public

These founders do not see themselves as pirates: They are frustrated consumers, not content with Apple’s business model that demands users pay for apps before testing them.

“Hackulous is a community dedicated to providing trials for iOS applications,” the site states. “We are home to all of the significant advances in the cracked apps community, including the cracking process, installation on mobile devices, patches, bluetooth/wifi app sharing, and application indexing.”

The evolution of the Hackulous flagship Installous from a crass command line tool into an interface rivalling Apple’s own store - together with its immense popularity among pirates - may cause some outsiders to question whether this stance continues to hold true.

For at least one Hackulous founder the movement has gone too far. Kytek, one of the original founders of Hackulous, left the scene once the "honest hackers" were outnumbered by pirates.

Kytek operated Appulous, the biggest cracked app store of its time, some four years ago. He left a note on what remains of the site, explaining how the scene changed for the worse.

“The vision was not piracy. Not even close. People's frustration over Apple's terrible App Store was what sparked our community. We were all elated when Apple finally allowed third-party applications, but fell intensely annoyed after we bought app after app that made itself out to be incredible in its description, but was worthless after purchase.”

“…the hardcore pirates had moved in and started taking the apps for free, with no intention to purchase them if they liked them. It was inevitable and no one was so naive as to think it wouldn't happen. This alone wasn't what turned things sour for me. It was intensely frustrating to see our community overrun by people interested in piracy alone, who thought they were somehow entitled to free iPhone apps.”

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