The Android Developer vs. The One-Click Crackers

As the developer sees it:

"I mean it's only 99 cents we're talking about. No one would go to the trouble... Would they?"

It seems simple enough, write a nifty app that does something novel put a few non-intrusive ads in it to entice regular users to upgrade to your 'ad free' version for a price that could easily be covered by the coins in most readers couches. This model has flourished despite there having been sites offering cracked or simply full copies of these pay applications for free to downloaders, from the beginning of the Android platform. But who is really going to go to all that trouble to break my application and release it for free if we are only talking about $0.99? I mean, would they?

As the cracker sees it:

"These developers pump out deceptively marketed applications that cost the user to basically load a web page in this 'application'.. what nerve."

I'm afraid it’s been happening since the dawn of paid computer applications and, will continue well beyond the Android platform. From my view, it appears there are two main types of application crackers: the well-read, creative and, to a certain extent, respectful cracker and the fly-by-night ‘one-click crackers’ who love using tools made by others that do processes they do not really understand for their own benefit. The latter has had little luck in the desktop cracking world due to the complexity of compiled binaries versus the android application which is, at best, a zipped up file (that is also a zip file) which contains instructions (Dalvik virtual machine opcodes) that can, more or less, be reversed back to a pretty readable version of the original Java source code. Yup, that easy most of the time.

Well that’s a shame but so what to do?

Not much there is to do. Users should use new technologies to keep their applications up to date with the most available software protection mechanisms and throwing a crafty trick or two in there to thwart the auto-magic tools seems like it’s enough to raise the challenge of cracking your application to the level it might just be worth the $0.99. That being said, that won’t stop it from showing up on www.downl0ad-st0len-apkz.biz. Even so, who cares? If you’re app is priced fairly, protected cleverly and often updated (requiring the pirates to go through this whole process again) it seems logical that would help any potential revenue impact. All in all, I can say for certain Google is not the correct group to blame here. Putting the responsibility of policing the internet to ensure crappy software licensing paradigms are enforced sounds absurd to me and, if you want to go all solder of fortune on these pirates, maybe the concerned developer should pursue these bandits.

I have a few ideas that might make the matter a bit more interesting for all involved that I will put up as I flesh them out but I really want to hear from both sides; I disagree that the pirate doesn't have a voice in the matter. I mean, ultimately, they are the ones who spend most of their time dealing with any protection mechanism? What project sprint would be complete without their user stories? :)