[iainmerrick]

I disagree, the openness of the implementation does help. People have different skills - not everyone doing these statistical analyses would be able to decompile a game, say.

Flappy Bird and Desert Golfing are both really simple, and both were viral successes; but neither was directly analysed so rapidly and so openly, because it’s much more difficult to do that on iOS.

[seoulmetro]

That's the thing. More people are going to analyse it basically if it's open, but they wanted to analyse it either way and if it were closed, they would have found the several people who did spend the work decompiling and analysing certain data or reverse engineering it and use their findings.

It's kind of made easier, but not started by open code.

[iainmerrick]

Hmm, I don't entirely disagree, but friction is a real thing and can make a massive difference in whether something becomes a viral hit or not.

If something is a huge success it's likely to be hacked, sure. But being open and hackable can contribute to its success, so if it's closed, it might be less likely to be a success in the first place. In which case nobody will bother hacking it.