Apple is currently spending lavish quantities of ad money on promoting the App Store and telling customers how there’s an app for just about anything on the iPhone. It all makes it seems like a fantastic time for developers to jump on board the App Store bandwagon and start developing new apps like mad. However, there is a dark side to the App Store that Apple will not acknowledge, or, it seems, do anything about – piracy.

The piracy of digital content is nothing new, and there was no reason to believe that Apple’s App Store would somehow be immune to being boarded by pirates and plundered. However, the extent of the piracy is staggering.

According to Wired.com some 20% of all apps contained in the App Store have been pirated. That is such a staggeringly high amount that I initially had trouble believing it.

However, after spending a little “quality” time roaming the darker streets and back alleyways of the Internet I think that it could be an underestimate. If you apply the 80/20 rule to the App Store (that is, that 80 per cent of the apps are little more than junk) then a very high number of the high quality, highly desired apps have been cracked and made available for free download.

In other words, the pirates appear to be targeting the most popular apps. In my travels I came across hundreds of individual apps that were cracked and ready for download, but more worrying I found archives containing hundreds of cracked apps freely available. The value of such a bundle must be in the thousands of dollars.

Get the full story here at Datamation.com.