Does Google Care If Your App is Pirated or Not? (hint: maybe not)

A (not so) shocking news came to light recently that involves Google Play Store and Android game developer, MadFinger. "Dead Trigger" is a zombie-game published by MadFinger was put at the Play Market for $0.99, same price goes to their iOS version on the App Store.

After a while, MadFinger decided to relaunch the game as a free downloadable game on Google Play but still charge $0.99 on the App Store. The reason? The piracy level of the Android version of the game is too high. For some of us, this news did not come as a shock.

The question emerges, does Google care if your app is pirated or not? We know Apple does, but how about Google and other app store players?

We all know Google's strategy in the smartphone competition with Apple and Microsoft -> go mainstream! Get everyone to use Android, eliminate every barrier and make it easy for people to adopt. This is why Google decided to make Android OS available for free, although they have an association of manufacturers and partners, you have to pay for membership of course. Point is, Google just want to dominate the market before their competitors do.

And it's working. According to latest reports, today Android owns 59% of smartphone marketshare while runner-up iOS owns 23% worldwide. Whether which one is making more money out of it is a totally different question.

With Google Play Store, Google is expecting more data usage and potential monetization for content publishers, more relevant content means more potential user. But what Apple does and Google doesn't is that one little thing called "curation". This is what we essentially pay to Apple whenever we buy apps from Apple App Store, the guarantee that the app is legit and working properly according to Apple's standard.

What about Google? They have standards, but they can't put the bar too high for developers because it's a barrier. You have to minimize the barrier if you want to dominate marketshare.

This is essentially why Google lets people install apps developed by unauthorized developers and outside of the Google Play ecosystem. Of course every strategy comes with a price, and in Google's case it's illegal/unauthorized/un-curated apps and also piracy. At the end of the day, this will bring the consumers down and disappointed with apps they download from Google Play.

In this case, just like MadFinger. And learning from this case, we learn that minimal barrier, unregulated freedom and free-from-filter-apps  is good for market domination, but not necessarily good for market satisfaction for both developers and consumer.

So back to the question, does Google care if your app is pirated of not? I don't think so. But then again, I don't think they should.