[The] internet is not a substitute for your brain.
You're right, critical thinking is important but not something you appear to be doing. It's important to read what others post before responding in a blind fury with things you yourself appear not to have read. You ultimately just undermine yourself and waste everyone's time - including your own.
Internet articles are not the epitome of truth, either. They are just opinions as well. Someone else's opinions, in particular. For every link you can provide stating an "opinion", there can be another one (and most probably more than one) stating the opposite.
Articles are informed opinions, which is more than you've been willing to do with what you've expressed in most of your posts thus far. As for the idea that you can find articles to contradict any article I may reference - you are creating a
false equivalency. Just because you can find a dissenting view doesn't mean it has authority on the subject or makes a solid argument and is somehow equal to any other view. Again what is it informed by? Are you really going to post some unknown author from a no name website (as you have here) and expect that he or she speaks with the same authority and professionalism on the Android market as someone covering it from Forbes? Let's look at the absurd content of some of these pieces:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/piracy-android-how-bad-is-it-really/
"According to Android Authority, only 10% of the apps that were downloaded in 2012 were actually purchased, indicating that the rate of piracy was indeed somewhere around 90% — even back then."
If you had bothered to
read this carefully and follow the link you'd realize this report (which there's no actual link to and doesn't appear to exist) by Starforce is untrustworthy, as the company sells "software for developers to secure their applications." One thing Starforce does say is:
"While there is no comprehensive Android piracy study, every developer estimates its rate."
http://www.star-force.com/press/articles/index.php?news=2520
So the company that is attributed with a quote (which appears to be bogus) about knowing the state of the industry says no one knows the state of the industry. Interestingly they also go on to support the idea that piracy can act as PR.
Now lets take a look at some of the other pieces you have, usually citing one or two developers, usually the exact same ones (hmm what great promotion) who tell us they've been burned by pirates.
http://www.trustedreviews.com/opini...-a-problem-but-developers-shouldn-t-jump-ship
This piece very much like the rest you linked, takes one developer's self estimate on piracy and tries to blow it up to epidemic proportions:
"95 percent of the downloads of said release on Android hadn't been paid for."
But unlike some of those other pieces which uniformly act as press releases from the developer, with little to no scrutiny or questioning of anything they say, here there is at least some (though, very little) transparency on how those numbers were arrived at. The developer Ustwo admits that its figures of piracy didn't include Amazon making them near meaningless given the size of Amazon. We also don't know if they include free copies that were done as part of a promotion or users installing the same legitimately paid for app on a second or 3rd or 4th (family) device.
Further
did you ever question why these types of articles pop up on 3rd rate websites all the time? And when you go to sites like Forbes, the NYTimes, the Economist or anything else with some real journalism you get a closer inspection of what is being said:
http://www.economist.com/node/3993427
http://freakonomics.com/2012/01/12/how-much-do-music-and-movie-piracy-really-hurt-the-u-s-economy/ (Both of these cover some of the fallacies of the BSA you link to)
Most of your articles just emphasize the larger issue of piracy on Android vs. Apple, but I've already stated my agreement that piracy is larger on Android than Apple.
The reason why is at question here and the conclusion these developer puff pieces always reach for is the lack of DRM. Well sorry but the
correlation of weak DRM on Android does not equate to the
causation of piracy. There is much stronger evidence (which I've already provided) to suggest it is simply an issue of the low end market Android represents, (shocker poorer people may be more likely to take something they can't afford than those that can, and if they don't have the ability to steal something just don't buy it thus they're using Android junk phones instead of Apple).
As for the Microsoft, Adobe, etc pieces you've linked, I've already accused you of uncritically regurgitating the propaganda of multinational corporations so I don't get why you're furthering my point again here.
"It is obvious that if I spent 5 more minutes searching, my post will have double the size..."
"Real discussions cannot be conducted with a mixture of links. Welcome to the internet...don't use it to make an argument if you want to be taken seriously..."
You might need to take more time reading and writing than linking or searching. I've linked articles to support what I say. It is not a substitution for an argument itself, as you're doing with your post. However your distain of informed and critical argument should be clear to anyone reading your posts by now.
Providing crap resources to justify gullible views is no substitute for the rigor of critical thinking substantiated by clear evidence.
Cheers.
