The amount of piracy is getting more and more frustrating. People who steal music/games/movies used to argue that they were getting ripped off and those who produced the media deserved it. Yet even apps that can be easily found and purchased immediately for just $0.99 are STILL getting stolen rampantly. how much better a buying environment can people ask for? Prosecuting individual pirates hasn't helped much and probablyn won't unless many more people were prosecuted, which would take enormous resources. ISPs could block service to sites that act as hubs for file-sharing, but that would get into the whole net neutrality thing. What do you all think about this?
You can only make it more annoying...it's pretty easy to detect jailbreak but a lot of legitimate payers jailbreak, so it's bad to give them a poor play experience. The real answer is no. Not on any platform, ever. If a hacker has physical access to a system it's over. Security is a matter of how hard you want to make it for an attacker; if you really want information fully secure you should destroy it completely, and then when it's destroyed, destroy everything you destroyed it with, where it was stored, etc. and kill the people who knew it. anyway. when you make it "difficult" for hackers, you make it harder for regular laypeople too. and it only takes on hacker to break it once, and you have hundreds working at it (depending on the software/hardware/etc....) people say PC gaming is dying and it's not because of consoles, it's because of DRM. games cost the same on consoles and PC, it's just that slipping a disc in a console is infinitely more convenient than slipping it in, entering a number, getting authorization, having 5 different DRM drivers that break your computer duke it out, etc. OK there's a lot more to it, like how easy it is to shovel out game after repetitive game using incrementally improved engines on static hardware (PS3/360) as opposed to a moving target....and 100 other issues...but yeah. anyway rant aside, I'm a security expert, and the answer again is no. don't even worry about it. ignore them and move on. there are hundreds of millions of non-pirates to sell to. by the way, some people don't have money to play most games that are good. "oh you have an ipod that means you've got money!" well no...it was a gift, for me at least. Im disabled and have 0 cash (I still pay for my itouch games though, you're right, it is a good deal everywhere in the app store) and there's a lot of games I wish I could play. So here's another way to look at it: if someone is poor or, in my case, poor because they're disabled...does that mean they shouldn't be able to play good games that a rich person can? what about a sliding scale for economic ability? what about a "pay what you can/believe it deserves" system? what about just being happy people are enjoying your work (assuming you get paid enough)? why do you assume the current IP model is in any way fair, or how things "should" be?
I think we should stop worrying about it. We need to focus on bigger and better things, rather than trying to shoehorn an archaic methodology into current technology.
Uhhhhh..... YEAH YOU CAN! Just google it! You can get any Eliminate, COD Zombies, whatever, in-app purchases for free. And it's not very hard, just requires SSH. As for the OP's problem. Apple has this API that allows you to verify the UUID that an application is running on with the list of UUIDs that purchased the app and blacklist any mismatches.,
useless! just like any other authentication scheme, a trivial crack! replace "is game authentic" function call original: original <...all code to verify...then return yes or no> replacement <return yes> That API only stops wholesale copying, but again...it only takes one pirate...
There is simply no way to stop piracy. If it can be protected, it can be unprotected, and it has been going on since there was something to pirate. Any legitimacy check, no matter how clever or convoluted, can easily be bypassed with a simple return positive authentication hack, just as writingsama mentioned. All they have to do is locate the routine that performs the authentication check(s) and rewrite the part of the code that returns the result of said authentication to always return positive. You can detect if the app has been cracked, and you can have your app "phone home" with the UDID of the device hacked, and you can even blacklist that UDID, but A) The phone home routine can be rerouted or nulled out altogether, and B) Pirates can fake their UDID. Even the Freemium model is vulnerable for all but consumables. Non-consumables can be bought by the hacker and distributed with the IPA. Just ignore the pirates. Pirates will pirate regardless of what you try, and the vast majority of them would never be converted to sales if they couldn't get a hacked copy of your app anyway. Focus on the legit customers. It's the only way.
However big, or small, the damage of piracy is, I don't think it should be brushed aside. Because if we do that, we are sending a dangerous message that says it's okay to pirate, and if you do that, it won't be long before all of your customers become pirates. While the bigger picture proves that the solution to piracy requires education to the public, more policing by the government, and a solution from Apple; there are things developers can do to help the spread of their app. You can file DMCA requests to all piracy app download sites — believe it or not, most will actually remove the file. You can also implement security measures in the app, which may get broken eventually, but can make it much more difficult for someone to hack, to the extent that it will take them longer to crack, and maybe that they may even give up.
While I agree that we should not completely ignore them and give them the tacit impression that piracy is okay, some measures are simply without any significant merit. To start with, adding tougher and tougher protection measures is ultimately a waste of time. Whether it's cracked now or in a week, it will be cracked. Never in the entire history of protected software has there been a single title that was so hard to crack that hackers just gave up. Not one. If anything, the harder it is to crack, the more sporting it becomes for them. It doesn't matter how long it takes. It will be done. You might buy yourself a few days where it's not pirated if you spend a pile of time engineering a sophisticated protection system, but I doubt those few extra days are worth the man hours invested in an effort that will ultimately be undone. Issuing DMCA takedown notices is one possibility -- but then you have to spend the time to track down as many pirate sites that carry it as possible if you want it to be effective to a useful degree, presuming most of them comply. Possible, but a bit of a time investment. I'm not saying don't fight. I'm just saying, pick your battles and choose your weapons wisely; steel doors won't stop a battering ram for long, but a few well-placed tripwires beyond an unlocked gate can work wonders when used properly.
No, you can pirate the DLC sometimes. But the base game's download, yeah that's done legit (I mean why bother to not download it from iTunes) and then that download is tracked by the position charts. So even the dirty pirates give you better position. And better position means more people can see your game and legit customers can buy things. Thus a bit of victory is stolen from the pirates. You got to step back and look at the big picture.
Ever since the advent of ad supported software I've seen pirates uploading software onto piracy sites with the ads all stripped out, I'm sure that could happen with ad-supported iPhone/iPad apps too.
Are there any statistics about how much income is actually lost due to piracy? As a small press book publisher, a lot of us are looking at ebooks with a wary eye-simply because of the illegal downloads. It's a little different for us as we can wait until sales of a physical copy dry up, and then release an ebook to make some easy cash (there's really nothing to do but upload it-as the formatting and everything was already done for the physical copy), but I have to think it hits app developers a lot harder.
I don't think it's possible to come up with actual numbers. The industry mouthpieces just count every single known pirated copy as a lost sale to amp up the FUD about piracy's effects on them without acknowledging that the vast majority of those pirated copies would never be converted to sales if piracy didn't exist. If you want real numbers you have to figure out what percentage of those who pirated an app would have bought it given no other alternative, and that's nearly impossible to do.
Just build a quality app, sell it at a practically good price (not too high for the customer, not too low for you as the developer) and release updates for it as frequent as you can--that's how we were able to convince most of our "pirated players" to purchase a licensed version.
I was thinking about this problem the other day. Wouldn't a solution be to force people to rate it? This would be stupid though, but it would stop piracy. Because pirating from other sites does not let you rate and review games.
