Piracy had always been a concern for developers, especially the ones with expensive apps. 24/7 Wall St. today published a report citing piracy rates to be as high as 75% on a lot of the applications. The report also found the average cost of a paid app to be $3. After playing with the numbers, 24/7 Wall St. estimates the App Store has lost $150 million in revenue for Apple, and $310 million for the developers for a total of $450 million in total revenue lost.

They also put forward a good conclusion. Apple doesn’t care about piracy per se because they are not generating a significant amount of revenue from its App Store, nor is it their primary business model. They want to sell their high margin iPhone and iPod Touch devices, and they have been successful in attracting consumers to that, thanks to the popularity of its App Store and the high quality of the apps available.

For developers’ sake, Apple has to look into this problem and come up with ways to remedy it. While a lot of developers are generating plenty of revenue off the legitimate downloads, they could be doing a lot better financially. Apple must do their part to keep the ecosystem clean to encourage further creativity and the ability for some developers to have iPhone/iPod Touch exclusive development studios.