If there’s one thing I hate it’s “exclusivity”. I never let this sort of thing positively influence my decision to select a given device or carrier — and will usually weigh this sort of behavior negatively when making my selection.

The way I see it, a carrier who contracts with someone (say an app/service provider) to let their app ONLY run on a specific carrier’s network is lame at best. It sends the message that “our phone and/or network sucks, so we have to use gimmicks to get people to sign-up with our service if they want our ‘exclusive content’” (or device).

I can see including a particular app free on phones from a specific carrier and releasing them into the Market so users on other carriers have to pay for it, but not making it available? That only leads to one thing.

Yes, that one thing is piracy. And it’s happened again, this time it’s the NFL Football app.

You can’t find it in the Market. Why? Because it’s not there. It’s one of those “if you want this app you’ve got to use this carrier” deals. But, not letting this kind of strong-handed “censorship” win out, the .APK has been hacked to allow any carrier to run the app over at this XDA-Developers thread.

Now, before anyone gets upset, no, neither myself nor pocketnow.com is advocating piracy. Rather, I’m just illustrating the absurdity of this kind of behavior. The harder a carrier locks something down, the more determined others are to unlock it. So, carriers, please, stop it with this silliness. It’s only giving your black-eye!

Now its your turn, would you obtain and run a pirated app because it “wasn’t available” for your device or on your carrier’s network?

Would you be willing to pay money for this same app from the Market rather than use a pirated/hacked version if given the choice?