[android-developers] Re: Android Market Anti-Piracy

It's incorrect to believe that hackers/crackers wouldn't care about
removing the protection from a cheap products. The hackers/crackers
don't care about the price of the product, they just want to get
famous so they crack the most popular applications regardless of
price. They don't think in economical terms.

People who are buying products are however thinking in econimical
terms, so they might be less interested in looking for a cracked
version if the product is cheap, so having copy protection on a $1
product might be close to worthless.

On 16 Nov, 23:04, Paul Turchenko <paul.turche...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I highly doubt that anyone would do that for $1 application. Effort
> not worth trying.
>
> On Nov 16, 9:55 pm, strazzere <str...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Since reversing an application is a rather menial task now, whats to
> > prevent a user from taking your application - stripping the protection
> > and re-releasing it? Not to mention that IMEI spoofing to an
> > application can be done with a little bit of research.
>
> > More importantly, with your approach - what happens when someone
> > strips out the protection, throws it into a nice little program - then
> > bombs all the IMEI numbers they want? Then you'll have "pirates" being
> > blocked who well, never pirated your application. Seems like an easy
> > way to quickly make your blacklist pretty inaccurate.
>
> > -Tim Strazzere
>
> > On Nov 16, 2:02 pm, Rachel Blackman <ceruleanspa...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > On Nov 16, 2009, at 10:34 AM, nEx.Software wrote:
>
> > > > Not to mention that just because someone might have pirated some app
> > > > at some time, doesn't mean that they pirated your app.
> > > > That's why it needs to be able to check against Google Checkout or
> > > > whatever payment processor is used...
>
> > > Also not to mention how many people buy out-of-contract phones off of eBay to toy with new techy stuff.  What if someone gets their phone's IMEI blacklisted in your database, goes and sells their phone, and someone innocent now picks up the phone and finds abruptly they can't use any of the apps linked into this antipiracy thing?  (And lest you say that wouldn't happen, look at how many of the Xbox 360 consoles that have gotten locked out of Xbox Live abruptly ended up on eBay, while the folks who got locked out go get new consoles.  After all, Xbox Live uses similar security methods, where the lockout applies to the hardware ID, not merely the account.)
>
> > > This isn't to say that antipiracy methods aren't desirable or useful.  Just that if they bite /innocent/ users as well, you'll have a headache to deal with.  Look at how many 'I can't see this app in the market!' threads we already have, and how much frustration there is just from developers over that.  Imagine the users adding to that with 'I paid for this app off the store, but when I try to run it claims I pirated it!'
>
> > > In general, as a software developer, I tend to think that antipiracy methods that allow some pirates through are better than antipiracy methods that might flag innocent users as wrongdoers.

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