No sooner did the iPhone’s App Store debut than someone found a way around Apple’s DRM and started pirating apps. But is it really as big a deal as we have been led to believe?

Gizmodo has a fascinating and very thorough study of the so-called app piracy problem. Sure, we’ve all seen the headlines, with 90 percent piracy rates and $450 million in lost sales estimated -- but despite the initial alarm, the problem of App Store piracy actually appears to be dying just as quickly as it came onto the scene.

Needless to say, piracy of App Store apps requires a jailbroken device and Cydia, which Gizmodo calls “the jailbreak equivalent of the App Store.” Add a new source in Cydia, download a couple of rogue apps which let you both crack your own apps as well as download those from others and away you go. At the height of the piracy scene just months ago, there was a site called Appulo.us, which made it super-simple to find hacked apps. While it vanished off the face of the Internet last month, there are still plenty of torrent sites offering all manner of hacked apps -- you just have to be more resourceful in finding them.

So how many jailbroken devices are actually in use? Thankfully, the folks at iPhone analytics firm Flurry know the answer. VP Peter Farago is quick to point out: “Under 10 percent of the iPhone installed base is jailbroken.” Given the ever-increasing difficulty in jailbreaking the more recent devices, that number could even be much lower.

And how are the App Store developers being affected by this piracy? “Roughly 10 percent of our paid app users are coming from piracy,” claims PageOnce CEO Guy Goldstein, whose popular Personal Assistant is a top-selling app in the productivity category. That’s a surprising number, considering the company also offers a full-featured free version of the app in addition to the $6.99 paid model.

“Although I think piracy is generally bad and negatively affects companies, for us it’s not a big issue,” Goldstein continues. “Our business model is based on purchasing, but also advertising. The more users we have, the better.”

In addition to in-app advertising -- which really can’t be circumvented by pirates unless they shut off their network connection -- Apple has also been pushing in-app purchases as a method of getting around the problem, particularly since they started allowing such purchases with free apps last October. The tactic has worked well for iPhone game developer ngmoco, whose apps are almost entirely free now.

Apple may never completely stomp out piracy, but they may have better luck with jailbreaking -- recent moves such as allowing 3G streaming from apps such as SlingPlayer Mobile or Skype give jailbreakers one less reason to hack their devices. If they can take a cue from Google’s Nexus One and offer a fully-unlocked version of the iPhone to anyone who wants it, they may well stomp out one of the last remaining reasons to jailbreak the device -- which would likely be the final death knell to App Store piracy at the same time.