Published in Mobiles

War of the pirate iPhone applications

by on31 March 2009

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Pirates police each other


Two unofficial
iPhone application peddlers are fighting a hand bags at dawn duel over who flogs software to Apple's gadget users.

Punters using jailbroken iPhones often run a bit of software called Installous which was made by the people Hackulo.us. The software allows jailbroken iPhones to use applications which were stored on the official Apple App Store free of charge. The outfit asked for a donation and that was it.

However a new player, called Mega entered the scene which offers direct downloads of 4000 App Store apps. The thing is that you have to pay $9.99 for 1 month, $23.99 for 3 months and $41.99 for six months. But the people at Hackulo.us claim that Mega ‘borrowed’ some code previously developed for Installous and this along with the ‘pay for warez’ issue seem to really get on their tits.

One coder called Kyek said that if you’re forced to spend money to use a service, you should be spending it on the actual apps you get, not making some greedy pirate rich. So Kyek created a new application known as ‘Grabulous’ which allows iPhone users to instantly download any of the 4000+ apps from Mega’s servers - free of charge.

The idea is that either give iPhone users the Mega service for free, or alternatively crash the Mega servers through being overloaded by non-paying users. Mega tried to block Grabulous, but Kyek promised a new version of Grabulous to get around these measures.

Mega now says that it will no longer require monthly subscriptions but will instead ask for donations while supporting this revenue stream with advertising. Due to this new system, users will be limited on the number of apps they can download each day, dependent on server load.
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