Another shot at piracy and the app store

25 Oct
2009

90%. Wow, that’s crazy. Smells Like Donkey published an nice report about their piracy rate.

John Gruber from Daring Fireball postet something about Anti-Bootlegging Measures and how they work best. You have to be patient, show a message after – let’s say 10 starts – and tell the user that what he does is wrong.

Please don’t pirate CandyBar. We’re a small company making software for you, and software sales are what keep our company going.”

And damn, i didn’t knew that there was an whole app-store like site dedicated to piracy, with screenshots for apps and more…

The developer of full screen web browser blogs about this in detail, and posts some links how to achieve this detection.

Currently IPA cracker work by tweaking the Info.plist of your app, telling the phone that the app is from apple and secure. You can detect this roughly by this code:

NSBundle *bundle = [NSBundle mainBundle];
NSDictionary *info = [bundle infoDictionary];
if ([info objectForKey: @"SignerIdentity"] != nil)
{
/* do something */
}

Problem is, this is not an approved check by apple. It’s not likely, but something could go wrong there. And IPA cracker may change their process, it’s the usual cat and mouse game that you have everywhere in the industry when DRM is active. At least be somewhat more subversive.

Update: This no longer works. But THIS should get you started for the next round.

Related posts:

  1. iPhone Piracy
  2. Publishing on the iTunes App Store
  3. Test Driven Development with Objective C

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