Android app ‘pirated 2,300% more than iOS edition’

Android Piracy rates for Appy Entertainment’s Facefighter game were 2,330 per cent higher than on its iOS counterpart, according to studio exec Steven Sargent.

"The piracy rate on Android was 70 to 1 compared to 3 to 1 on iOS," Sargent told Pocketgamer. "That’s crippling."

The Appy exec said the developer also had problems with the compatibility of smartphones, with the first customer complaint coming within hours of FaceFighter’s release.

"There are too many devices for a company of our size to deal with the compatibility on Android," said Sargent. "Compatibility was a real nightmare."

He added the studio had to “brute force textures to 25 per cent just to get the game to run” and that the audio was so buggy “we couldn’t work out how to fix it, so we didn’t.”

Despite the high piracy rate, Appy recently announced it had reached 10 million downloads across all its games.