Sopods have released a new version of their App Store app Full Screen Web Browser [iTunes Link]. The new version applies some amazing anti-piracy measures. Its a known fact that AppStore apps are available for free via illegal sources and that rips off the developer of his due share.
Downloaded 66,000 times (legitimately) this app is amongst the Top 100 apps on the AppStore. However once the developers realised that cracked versions were out on the www; they decided to do something about it.
Note from Ben’s Blog (the developer):
The solution that I came up with is for the app to simply detect whether it has been compromised and to send that data over the wire to our server. All of these simple server pings are logged along with the unique device identifier (UDID) so that illegal usage can be tracked. Then, the server controls a demo period; after 10 runs a message is presented which gives the choice of visiting the Full Screen Web Browser page in the App Store (iTunes link) or exiting the app.
The version 1.1 update of Full Screen was released on March 4th and a cracked copy showed up about 48 hours later. Since it was cracked (30 hours ago), illegitimate copies of Full Screen have been ran 1463 times on 560 devices. As there have been 5745 unique devices which have ran the 1.1 version of Full Screen during this 30 hour period, the illegitimate usage constitutes 9.75% of devices being tracked (any users running the 1.0 version are not being tracked).
Interesting! Hope Apple gets some mechanism against the pirates soon! App Store is certainly big business.
iPhone / iPod touch downloads
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
We have more than one iPhone syncing to a single “home” copy of iTunes. This allows a single App to be run on multiple phones, legally I presume.
Do you take account of this?
Ah! Y didnt I think of that…
Need to find an answer… Trying …
App Store purchases can be legally installed on up to five devices.
o i c
so there we go … thx ben