The only form of anti-piracy that has any real chance of working for a popular app is SaaS (Software as a Service). If the app can run entirely on the phone then the app can be pirated.
Now some may say, "Well MyHelloWorld hasn't been pirated!" but that's only because it hasn't reached the critical mass (in user base) to have the pirates care enough to pirate it. The critical mass required for a program to be pirated increases as you put in more security measures but every security measure will be cracked once critical mass is reached. This means that unless you don't intend for your app to be a top seller (which seems to be selling yourself short unless you are targeting a niche market purposefully) then why waste the development time coding in all sorts of crazy anti-piracy schemes that will get cracked if your software ends up actually being popular? You could instead devote that development time to adding features that will generate more sales instead. This doesn't even take into consideration the poor user experience and expensive support costs that anti-piracy measures entail. Some security measures require the user to do something extra to get the app working (like entering a CD-Key); if I ran into this on the Android Market I would uninstall the app, get a refund and find a competing product. Other security measures try to hide from the user but then you have to deal with support costs or sale losses to deal with problems they cause; if I *buy* an app and install it on my rooted phone (because I want to install more than 50MB of apps at a time) and then it calls me a pirate what do you think I am going to do? First thing, get a refund. Second thing, go pirate a cracked copy. On Nov 16, 12:36 pm, "admin.androidsl...@googlemail.com" <admin.androidsl...@googlemail.com> wrote: > So looking at it a different way ... > > Are there any popular android apps that are not suffering from massive > piracy? > > I had a quick hunt around and could see that MyBackup Pro asks for a > Google Checkout number and Copilot also requires a code on starting > up. > > Maybe there's something we can all learn by seeing how other app > developers are dealing with this issue. > > Does anyone know how effective these measures are? Has anyone seen any > other techniques that have worked. > > Its getting very tiring reading how pirates feel they have some right > to steal apps from hard-working devs. Would love to teach those guys a > lesson ... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
