“I’m glad something good came out of all this,” says PadMapper creator Eric DeMenthon. “Lots of people wrote to them about the PadMapper cease and desist [letter], so maybe that convinced them that it was worthwhile to do some mapping themselves.

"According to the iTunes Store Terms of Sale, all purchases made on the iTunes Store are ineligible for refund. This policy matches Apple's refund policies and provides protection for copyrighted materials."

Last October the game went free again, and stayed that way for four months. Then the sting came along. About a week ago (at time of writing), the game received an "update", which came with just four words of description - "Now Touch Racing Free!" As the game was already free, users could have been forgiven for thinking this wasn't much of a change. But in fact, the app thousands of them had paid up to £5 for had effectively just been stolen.

Two of the game's three racing modes were now locked away behind IAP paywalls, and the entire game was disfigured with ruinous in-game advertising, which required yet another payment to remove.

"Hi!

Thanks for contacting us.

I'm really sorry about that. I knew that this could happen. The team had no option but to do that.

We're not trying to make money from people who have already bought the game like you did. It is not an excuse, but only 4% of the 2MM downloads have been paid ones. Unfortunately, Apple doesn't provide with any methods to know when an user has paid or not for an app. We just want to monetize the game from that 96% who are enjoying the game for free. Our goal is to monetize them via advertisement. We understand that this is annoying for the players that have paid for it.

Yes, maybe we could have released a LITE version, but if we release a new free version, we couldn't monetize near 2 MM free downloads we already have. And why we have 96% free downloads? A very bad old decision.. We've begun a new phase at Bravo Games and we definitely need some revenues from those downloads.

At the moment all our efforts are focused in new projects. When we finish those projects, we'll evaluate the possibility of adding new content to previous games like Touch Racing Nitro.

I regret to hear that you never buy another of our apps."

If 96% of those were free downloads, that means that a whopping 80,000 people who paid money for Touch Racing have just been screwed. If we assume an arbitrary but reasonable average price of £1.19 (the second-lowest App Store price tier at the time most of the sales were made, though the app has cost at least twice that much for most of its life), that's just short of £100,000 that Bravo have extracted from consumers for what is in effect a "Lite" demo version of the game.

Imagine if the rest of the world worked this way. Imagine you went to Tesco and bought three boxes of Corn Flakes on a "three-for-two" offer, only for a Tesco employee to turn up at your house one day a month later and confiscate not only the "free" box but also the second one that you'd actually paid for. There'd be riots, or at the very least a long court backlog of assault cases and battered workers. Yet apparently, for videogames it's the dynamic economic model of the future.

WoSland is a pretty wily consumer, and currently has eight apps sitting in its iPhone's "update" queue which are never going to get those updates, because the "update" in question is in fact a downgrade, removing functionality and/or adding ads. We've deleted many others altogether for the same reason.

But even if Apple is within their legal rights, releasing a firmware update that they know will break some phones is a terrible business strategy. It's never a good idea to anger your customers, and it certainly wouldn't be difficult for Apple to add a function to the firmware updater that checks the phone for unlocking software and warns the customer if a potential problem is detected. Users might still be annoyed at being unable to get the latest firmware, but that's better than silently turning their phone into a paperweight. More generally, Apple shouldn't underestimate the value of the unlockers to the iPhone product ecosystem. Those sorts of tech-savvy early adopters are the most likely to develop new and innovative uses for the product, thereby increasing its value for all customers. For example, podcasting has surely made the iPod more valuable; it was invented by tech hobbyists and only later integrated by Apple into iTunes. And if Apple plays hardball with phone-unlockers, that's not likely to enhance their bottom line. More likely, they'll most likely just persuade people who like tinkering with their gadgets to buy their next cell phone from another company.