Developers celebrate a huge victory today as the most well-known app to get cracked apps, Installous, has been shut down by Hackulo.us. It stated that the “community has become stagnant and [their] forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the motivation of [their] staff.” Today is a sad day for those who used Installous and did not want to buy apps. Developers, of course, are happier than ever knowing that their chief rival is down. However, the removal of such a service is only temporarily. There are other alternatives available that Installous has taken “market share” away from that will rise up in this pirate’s time of crisis. The removal of Installous could actually be a bad thing for developers in the long term since something better than Installous could come out and be even more of a threat than Installous ever was. However, according to the pirating community (of which I am NOT a part of), there is no such great alternative as of yet. It is obvious that a developer will take great advantage of this opportunity and develop a new Installous, but when and where it will come from, remains to be seen. Therefore, for now, developers rejoice but it should be a fair warning to them that a new Installous will rise out of the take down of Installous and could even be better than it, posing more of a threat to developers everywhere. Therefore, do rejoice developer community for you have won a major battle (I rejoice with you) but do know that the pirate community will rise up again. You have won the battle but certainly not the war. Best of luck to all developers everywhere.
Thanks for reading,
Joe