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Some interesting numbers coming out of 24/7 Wall St. indicate that Apple is losing almost a half billion dollars because of piracy on the App Store. According to their research, Apple rakes in anywhere between $60 and $110 million a quarter from App Store sales, of which between 13% and 21% of the over three billion downloads are paid apps. That said, Apple is certainly losing out on some money due to the over 100,000 apps available through other stores that commonly pirate legit applications. In fact, almost 40% of the content on these stores is pirated, according to their information, which equals up to a rather large loss for both developers and Apple.

Using their numbers and calculations, we can assume that 17% of App Store sales—or 510 million downloads—are paid applications. Considering that paid applications have a piracy rate of 75% (or 3 pirated copies for 1 legit, according to the report) and the average cost of an app being $3, Apple is losing $4.59 billion (split between them and developers to piracy). However, further assuming that only 10% of these pirates would have bought the application through the App Store had it not been for free, we see that Apple is losing nearly $500 million from this. That’s no small chunk of change, folks.

I’d certainly like to see Apple take some sort of step towards stopping this, if at all possible. There is no doubt that it is not only in their best interest, but it would also be greatly appreciated by developers who are already finding it hard to make their app stand out and make money in the App Store.

Via [24/7 Wall St.]