Android Comes Under Fire From Game Developers On Piracy

id="article-body" class="row" section="article-body"> Dead Trigger in Google Play Store recently dropped its price from $0.99 to free because of illegal downloads. Screenshot by Dara Kerr/CNET Madfinger Games recently lowered the price of its Dead Trigger game from $0.99 to free on the Google Play Store. The reason, it announced, APKX was because of the "unbelievably high" amount of illegal downloads on Google's Android devices despite the game's inexpensive price, according to the Guardian.

Here's what Madfinger Games said on its Dead Trigger Facebook page:




Regarding price drop. HERE is our statement. The main reason: piracy rate on Android devices, that was unbelievably high. At first we intend to make this game available for as many people as possible - that's why it was for as little as buck. - It was much less than 8$ for SHADOWGUN but on the other hand we didn't dare to provide it for game review free, since we hadn't got XP with free-to-play format so far. - However, even for one buck, the piracy rate is soooo giant, android that we finally decided to provide DEAD TRIGGER for free.



The version of Dead Trigger on Apple's operating system remains a $0.99 paid game, according to the Guardian.

Madfinger Games is just one of many game developers that is working to combat illegal downloads on Android devices. Other developers that have spoken out include Sports Interactive, Appy Entertainment, and Korean developer com2uS, according to the Guardian. After Sports Interactive launched Football Manager Handheld for apk download Android, its piracy rate was 9:1, which is one game sold for every nine illegally downloaded. Appy Entertainment's FaceFighter Gold had a piracy rate of 70:1 on Android and just 3:1 on iOS.

Related stories

Cox Communications hit with $1B music piracy verdict

Eight people charged with running illegal streaming services

YouTube cracks down on stream-ripping sites that pirate music

Digital video piracy costs movie and TV industry at least $29 billion a year, APK study says

Game of Thrones has the most malware of any pirated TV show
This comes after news of security researchers testing Google's Bouncer malware detection system for Android apps who managed to submit a benign app and then slowly update it to add malicious functionality. So their app, which started off as a simple SMS blocker, was updated incrementally to access all sorts of data on the device and even to turn the phone into a zombie for use in Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.

Piracy of Android apps is something Google seems to be paying attention to. Last week it announced that it beefed up its latest Android Mobile Games apps (https://raovat321.Net) OS -- Jelly Bean 4.1 -- with new features to divert hackers from installing malware that leads to information leakage, buffer overflows, and memory vulnerabilities.



Comments Android Jelly Bean Malware Google Play Google IBM Notification on Notification off Security