While there are thousands of things you can do to make it more difficult for someone to pirate your application, they all come at the cost of making it that much more difficult for your user to purchase your application and/or make your application more fragile. Many anti-piracy methods keep users from making legitimate backups of software, which might be alright if the user can download a replacement copy for free, but too often that's seen as a way to make another fast buck.
I believe that user education is an important, low cost, and least painful way to attack this problem. There will always be pirates, because the only way to prevent piracy is to lock the phone down so tight that no one can install or remove applications at all. What might reduce piracy is if there is a concerted effort to educate users about who they are hurting when they steal applications written by small developers. They need to learn that we're not all fortune 500 companies and that when they steal from us, they take food off our table. Even if it's a dollar app, it's still theft and still hurts us. Worst of all, they are driving the most innovative developers out of business. If there is enough piracy, it can bring down the whole platform, and they'll find no one developing for their android phones at all.
If all they want are applications developed by huge corporations that can't be bothered to listen to suggestions or fix bugs, piracy is certainly the way to go. Eventually they'll have no choice but to buy locked down phones offered to them in package deals with half the hardware features turned off.
All that said, this isn't much different than what we faced with personal computers a few decades ago. I suspect some kind of balance will evolve in time. Phones are going to eventually take over most of our personal computing tasks, relegating desktops and laptops to accessory status for many people. It's always fun to live in interesting times.
Ray David Sauter wrote:
More importantly - do Android devices have unique hardware identifiers like the iPhone's UUID? David Sauter
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