Dead Trigger was a bad example - personally I'm not wild about mixing purchase and in-app purchase at all - but in the overall discussion others stated similar experiences, in one case a developer quoting piracy rates of 90% on an app which I believe had no in-app purchases (sorry, can't find the link now).
Football Manager 2012 handheld will be one I'll watch with interest. The publishers Sports Interactive have said that it has it's targets for Android and if it doesn't hit them there won't be another version. That's a massive franchise (in the UK at least) so I'm keen to see whether it can justify it's existence (selling price $5).
That sounds like a much better example. Being an existing franchise, it should avoid what I believe to be the primary problem for both Android and iOS: app discovery.
I remember an anecdote about a 90% piracy rate. It turns out that the game was prominently listed on a popular pirate board, but was buried deeply on the app store.
Combine that with a tendency for pirates to install huge numbers of games that they'll never likely play, and a 90% piracy rate isn't surprising.
Personal anecdote: Massive sales cause me to buy games that I'll likely never play. I just dropped over $50 on Steam because of their massive summer sale. $20 went to the latest Humble Bundle. A few months ago I bought a bunch of games for 10 freaking cents each on the Google store. I've purchased two sequels and one in-app since for those games, but my total outlay is still well under $10.
So I believe that the biggest problems on both Android and iOS are pricing and discovery. Piracy is a problem, but not as much as pricing and discovery, IMO.
"So I believe that the biggest problems on both Android and iOS are pricing and discovery. Piracy is a problem, but not as much as pricing and discovery, IMO."
I'm not sure I'd want to rank problems, but I'd like to see everyone working on the problems they can solve (such as pricing and discoverability) before they start saying with certainty that piracy is killing everything.
Dead trigger makes its money from in-app purchases. In practice it is no more free now than it was before.
Piracy is rampant on iOS too. It's slightly more harder on an iOS device, but it's not exactly difficult.