IOS market in China broken by Kuaiyong?

Hello, I recently checked the stats of my game, i have best numbers of download from CHINA, but i never get a penny from that, most of people here have an iphone, but they never use apple store to manage their app, they just use kuaiyong, its allow you to get all your application for free, Kuaiyong use legal developer licence to distribute them, so player cant use IAP because its downloaded with an other dev account blocking all the developer to get income from IAP.

is there someone that have experience how to avoid this? would it be possible to block their dev account ID to be used in your app? i can find it in xcode list of developper when i connect an ipad with kuaiyong on my computer.

Im pretty sure the legal way in china will have no use, but if there is a way to block them to crack your app and block it income when they dont inject their own ads..

 

Kuaiyong use legal developer licence to distribute them

can t you send an email to apple?

 

It will take a big company complaining about that service for Apple to remedy the situation. They have your $100 a month.

 

Considering the english version is coming soon, it poses a bit of a threat to revenue.

 

http://www.cydiasources.net/kuaiyong-english-download.html

 

Cool, well I guess that's everyone's fault supporting that when developers move away from it. We've already long since moved away. What will remain is nothing but freemium shovelware. Hope people have fun.

 

TNW (TheNextWeb) reported this last year:
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2013/01/01/low-down-dirty-iphone-app-pirates/

Even Forbes covered this news from APRIL LAST YEAR.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoo...em-what-hope-is-there-of-stamping-out-piracy/

There is supposedly 5 million users of this service. That's quite a significant user base and potential customer base.

And its been more than 1 year 6 months, and yet Apple is not doing anything about it.

Like Damien was saying, even Freemium get hit by this. Since they are sign off with enterprise license and possibly altered or cracked in some way, IAP will not work so Freemium approach won't work. So this Kuaiyong is bad news all around, it will simply kill the App Store if it ever get successful, there will be no survivor.

 

.NET Rocks has a recent episode where they interviewed the lead developer of Draw a Stickman about marketing their game in China. He cited the same issue the OP mentioned, i.e. having the most downloads from China and not seeing a single penny in revenue.

They didn't specifically mention Kuaiyong, but their general strategy was to push localization to eleven by going as far a changing the artwork to be more culturally relevant (e.g. removing references to Christmas), and making the game free with tons of micro-transactions that weren't in the original game. The developer even mentioned that their CEO actually traveled to China to try and sort out the situation himself, though he didn't go into the details.

To me it felt like it wasn't something that a small indie developer can afford to do, but It might still be worth listening to.

 

There is an easy dirty hacky solution to get revenue from pirated copies in china : SHOVEL ADVERTISEMENTS DOWN THEIR THROUT, you can integrate an intrusive ad service ( video or interstitial ads) and make it only "activate itself" if the user iTunes account is based in China, you can detect where the user is based in many ways including the In-App purchase framework.

 

They don't change artwork to be more culturally relevant, I help correct English translation of a couple of Chinese apps and if anything I was surprised with how Western in appearance the app artwork was given how nice so much Chinese art work is from the past.

They change the art work to obscure that the games are being distributed in violation of the game EULAs.

 

I was referring to the game's original developers and not the pirates. And they (the actual game developers) did change the artwork to better fit the culture. Listen to the podcast.

 

why bother even publishing to that market if you aren't going to get a dime and they're going to hack anything they want into and/or out of the app....

from what I understand, if you don't deal in a way that western countries consider un-ethical with China business deals (bribes, kick-backs, grease ) you will never get anywhere.... you are better off (in my opinion) just ignoring them all together, and blocking the entire countries IP from any of your backend services.

 

Well one company is using every IOS developper work and making money with the chinese users instead, money that should be credited to the dev, not some leechers

 

I see, well.. what can you do when the one responsible for the OS can't protect it and the work developers do with it.

 

The articles that @I am da bawss linked to suggest that it's not that Apple can't, they just won't. One company is buying developer activations in bulk and the other is using Enterprise licensing. Apple can definitely crack down on both.

 

im not trying to block Chinese users i am trying to block the USERID used by kuaiyong, they only use one ID for all their app.

i would dream about doing something like

if(usedID == KuaiyongID)
PopMessage("please download this from the Applestore")
else
//do nothing

 

I think the only way to "defeat" this type of piracy is to move to server side network centric game. Because if you control the server you can block the IPs. The problem is now you have to make a network game, rent a server which significantly increase the budget and cost of production which is something small indie developers are not able to afford.

Basically, these type of companies will annihilate small indie developers in their market. If Apple and the government (of China) don't respond accordingly, there is very little chance for aspiring game programmers to survive in this type of condition over there. You either joins big companies that churns out online mobile MMO (which is what's happening over there) with endless IAP or you don't get in this business.

 

that could be a new service for unity ,so the dev would focus more on making game than dealing with this problem, they have a partnership with kii for the chinese market maybe that something they can look into, and all unity dev/game would be protected from this new form of piracy.

 

what if (usedID == KuaiyongID2)? KuaiyongID3? KuaiyongID4??

 

Write a stored proc to a local (SQLite) database, to check if a passed-in ID matches a known Kuaiyong ID. Sure, it means every time your app is started it will have to talk to Apple's servers and ask, 'Hey, what are Kuaiyong's currently-known IDs?' - if such a thing is possible, due to security considerations - but you can quickly determine if a Kuaiyong user is trying to use your app without paying you.

Better still, should you go for a centralized server approach later, you can merely install SQL on your server, and make sure that the Stored Proc gets built onto your server. It scales amazingly well!

 

its a bit of an old post but I got some research to share about this problem:

when you download an app you are forced to use a dummy itune account.
gamecenter does not work somehow you cannot connect to gamecenter while the app is downloaded from kuaiyong

some possible Kuaiyong Counter:

set the app to be free in china when publish to itune.
if the user language or country is chinese/china, force him to login into gamecenter. if gamecenter fail (because they use a dummy account), display a polite notification "downloading the app from itune will solve the problem".
i would advice to heavily use ads on chinese user, unity ads are instantly loaded from china, however loading the iap from itune store is extremly slow and often have some timeout.

also found this library but didnt tested it yet.

https://github.com/Shmoopi/AntiPiracy

 

In China ,it is a common phenomenon to use of piracy.

 

Reopening this old thread - curious if Kuaiyong is still an issue we have to be aware of, or if there are any other Chinese stores stealing our app's revenue and who they are.

Thanks