@all developers interested in anti piracy soln for iOS apps checkout http://mtiks.com (they also provide free piracy analytics)
Anti-piracy techniques
(57 posts) (42 voices)-
Silver and Gold packages could get to be expensive at 0.05c per unique device. If they bank on piracy numbers and you get 100,000 pirate downloads to 1000 actual sales that's a huge money loser.
5000$ for them vs 990$ for you... They earn 4010$.. you broke..
Obviously they want to make it sound like it's a massive issue, but in reality most pirates don't buy software.. and would have never bought your app.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Hi
is this code really sufficient to detect an illegal copy?
NSBundle *bundle = [NSBundle mainBundle]; NSDictionary *info = [bundle infoDictionary]; if ([info objectForKey: @"SignerIdentity"] != nil) { /* do something */ }it detects the SignerIdentity key into the info.plist file
Posted 1 year ago # -
*sigh*
A high piracy percentage is a sign that you haven't distributed many copies, maybe time to do some marketing or move onto a new app.
Posted 1 year ago # -
@MandarX - NO
The cracking process no longer adds that key (SignerIdentity) so it will always be nil.
I think the best advice I read was something like this:
"Take all the extra work, time and energy of putting anti-crack detection and extra code like running ads if cracked, etc. AND MAKE YOUR APP BETTER!"
:-]
CgPosted 1 year ago # -
@abitofcode I always thought that if your app is being pirated it means your app is pretty much successful.
I have an app that doesn't do well, and it's not pirated anywhere, because pirates won't put their effort to crack an app with little popularity.So I'm "waiting" to get pirated, since it means my app is doing good in the app store :)
I agree with @Verisutha and @Karl ... I think that 96% of people who pirate will never buy the app anyways... but if a friend of theirs sees that app and likes it, and he doesn't want to jailbreak, he might buy it.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Benihana
MemberI always thought that if your app is being pirated it means your app is pretty much successful.
Once it gets cracked, pirates can obtain a copy easily, while iTunes store customers are still paying. Basically there's no effort to obtain a pirated app so users will download stuff they don't care about (similar to people I know with music archives in the hundreds of gigs).
Posted 1 year ago # -
Interesting discussion. I'm soon releasing my first iPhone game and I've only added some basic encryption to the highscore save, to make it a little less obvious for lame hackers to cheat. I'm not worried about piracy, I'm more worried if people will actually like my game and play it :)
One question though, some of you report that you knew how many pirated copies vs sold apps you had. How did you track this?
Posted 1 year ago # -
How about this idea (from apple dev forum https://devforums.apple.com/thread/80657?tstart=0):
You can detect a cracked version (possibly, I didn't test) by trying to access a file outside your sandbox. If you are successful, you know it's cracked. Worth looking into?Posted 1 year ago # -
Benihana
MemberHow about this idea (from apple dev forum https://devforums.apple.com/thread/80657?tstart=0):
You can detect a cracked version (possibly, I didn't test) by trying to access a file outside your sandbox. If you are successful, you know it's cracked. Worth looking into?It's not sufficient to detect that your app is cracked, because anything you do to detect, or anything you do after you've confirmed that it's cracked, can be adjusted by the hacker. As has been said throughout this thread, it's not worth your time.
Posted 1 year ago # -
@manucorporat - Did you ever finish this function? I'm getting ready to release soon and I wanted to put in an achievement for buying the game. Also help me track a little how many buying vs stealing.
Posted 11 months ago # -
hecner
Memberohh! That is a very interesting approach and idea! I do not think there is room for a backfire here as it would not happen to be marked as pirated if it is encrypted by the system.
I would have to agree though that this would not be the amazing grace but just a small move forward to possibly eliminate piracy.
Posted 11 months ago # -
cndy
MemberI had an interesting discussion with a guy who is very active in the jailbreak scene yesterday. He is one of the few people who actually puts alot of effort into finding vulnerabilities in iOS in order to get root access to the device.
He had a very interesting idea (actually the idea came frome someone else, but he is thinking about implementing this "feature" in future jailbreak tools). The idea is to prevent tools like Installous from working at JB level. I think, this would be cool and a step into the right direction.
Killing off piracy (on iOS or anywhere else) will never happen. However, by disabling Installous et al. the majority of the standard iphone pirate "users" would have a problem. 90% of those guys do know how to load up Installous, but dont have a clue how to dump the decrypted binary manually. Of course, after some time people would figure out other ways to get Installous on their device, but it would make it much more diffcult.Posted 11 months ago # -
Cydia talked about not letting the user add the Installous sources, but they didn't go through with it and instead just "warn" the user that this source contain illegal stuff (as if the user that adds the Installous source doesn't already know that).
There will always be websites that let you download cracked apps and sync them to the device, but I assume that the majority uses Installous these days.
Posted 11 months ago # -
To put in my two cents: I personally think the time you're wasting on anti-piracy techniques could be used instead to improve your game further. Someone said that people who crack apps still won't buy your app if they are not able to crack it. So what's the point in wasting your time? It's like you could save some dollars but are forced to burn them immediately (which by the way is illegal in the US ;) Also note that the cracked app amount shrinks relatively to your real purchases depending on the number of purchases. So the more successful your app is the less pirated apps carry weight.
What I'm trying to say: I wouldn't waste my time on developing anti-piracy techniques. There's no real point in doing it so I invest the time for improving my app for all the people who actually buy my app.
Posted 11 months ago # -
An added concern with the anti-piracy methods is that they're exceptionally difficult to test, and we all know how important it is to throughly test an app before it's released into the wild...
Case in point - the first release of Jabbit included the SignerIdentity code quoted above to detect piracy, and serve up iAds to those that had pirated the game. Unfortunately the code didn't work properly - but it didn't impact the paid users, and just didn't serve up the ads to the pirates. In the first few weeks of sale, the paid sales were mediocre, but we saw consistent and encouraging growth in the pirate users.
In the first version update, which went live two days ago, I had been experimenting with the other detection techniques - but eventually decided against going the iAd to Pirates route, so I disabled that functionality, but left the analytics in. Unfortunately because I hadn't been able to fully test that code it introduced a bug (only in very rare circumstances, but a bug nonetheless) that could prevent the app from launching - and this could affect paid users!
Ultimately, I've now had to update the app again... And yes, the time spent doing all of this would've been much better spent on other activities.
I'm still encouraged by the growth in the piracy numbers, eventually word-of-mouth will get back in to 'paid' circles ;-) In fact, my China sales figures show this isn't just a pipedream...
Posted 11 months ago # -
cocos2dbeginner
Member@manucorporat - Did you ever finish this function? :)
Posted 11 months ago # -
If you just want to 'detect' piracy, rather than do anything about it... You can get a good benchmark by uploading a score to GameCenter upon launching your app. This will give you both a daily usage tally, and an overall usage figure. You can then compare this to the number of legit sales/downloads you get from iTunesConnect. In Jabbit's case, the GameCenter figures are around 30 times the legit users, which puts our piracy rate at a whopping 96.7%
Posted 11 months ago #
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