Let me share a nightmare with you that I'm still going through now. I have two apps on the market (screebl lite/pro) that have seen moderate success in Android Market terms, approaching 80k downloads. For the pro version, I had never enabled copy protection because of the problems that had been reported w.r.t. visibility. Also, I'd heard reports that the copy protection was fairly easy to break as well.
As my apps have gained traction, piracy has picked up. I mean REALLY picked up. Over 40% of the installs of my pro version are pirated. I've heard all of B.S. args about how I shouldn't care because those people wouldn't have paid anyway, it's free adveretising, they're from markets that can't pay. Whatever. So in a recent release I decided to flip the copy protection switch on. I've heard that the visibility issues have been corrected lately. What a shit storm that released! Almost immediately my app's active installs dropped by 4 points, which is the most significant factor in market ranking. Then the emails and market comments started to pour in. "F/c, your app has ruined my phone, I hate you and hope you die". Of course it took me a while to even track down the problem. Devs can't download their own paid apps. So far here's what I can tell happened: 1. Most installed users got F/Cs when trying to start the app after install. New installs seemed to work fine. 2. Problems occured across models and platform versions. 2. Uninstall/reinstall fixed the problem for some. 3. Some users had to do multiple reboots of the phone to get Screebl working. After these reboots, the application registry appeared to get out of whack, for some showing nothing but my app. 4. My app icon disappeared from many app drawers. 5. Doing an update and turning copy protection off seemed to fix the problems. My conclusion is this: make your mind up before you release. Google didn't used to let you change this setting on market, and now I can see why. I think they should move back in that direction until they have time to test this and iron out the defects. At least give a warning. I will just let the whole "Google needs to figure the piracy thing out" rant be implied here. Dave On Apr 16, 5:41 am, Geefer <[email protected]> wrote: > Without wishing to start a firestorm, what is the current consensus on > whether or not it is useful to use the Copy Protect setting when > publishing on the Market? What are the pros and cons of doing so? > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google > Groups "Android Developers" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected] > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected] > For more options, visit this group > athttp://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
