Looking around the Internet right now, it’s not hard at all to find Cartoon HD in many different forms – from online services hosted at websites (including one that’s supposedly an “official” continuation of the original app), to app packages ready for deploying on mobile devices, giving users the opportunity to manually install the app on their rooted phones.
It’s clear that the attempts to stop its spread have been unsuccessful, as people are more than willing to install it on their devices even if it means getting it through unofficial channels and not through the main app store. It’s not hard to find an APK package or the alternatives for other platforms, and in some cases the developers releasing those packages have even made their own extra modifications that add more features or polish the app experience even further.
What does this all mean for the industry? Trying to stop Cartoon HD and the likes of it is pretty futile – instead, the big companies should try to adapt to this situation and turn it into a successful business model. If people are willing to go through the effort to download a custom installation package and deploy it to their devices, then they should also be willing to pay a small fee to get constant access to such features officially.
There’s another side to this as well – as safe as most of the websites offering these copies of Cartoon HD may be, there’s still some risk for the user if they’re not familiar with the website and they don’t know how to install a custom app package on their devices. Messing up the installation process is sometimes possible, depending on the platform, and it’s never a fun experience.
So by trying to remove Cartoon HD from the market, media companies are pushing users to these shadier apps that may or may not lead to harm for their devices – is this really a sound business model, and should the consumer be left to suffer the consequences in the end?
It would perhaps be better to just allow Cartoon HD to come back on the market in its official form, but it’s probably a little too late for that at this point. Media companies will never let it happen anyway, and even though there were some rumors that the developers of the app are planning to bring it back in an official form, this is not very likely as it would require them to sign many different deals with media companies, which will probably not be an easy task for a big studio, let alone a small developer.