iPhone app developer fights piracy!

cracked-app

Sopods have released a new version of their App Store app Full Screen Web Browser [iTunes Link]. The new version applies some amazing antipiracy measures. Its a known fact that AppStore apps is 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 discover whether it has been compromised and to send that data over the wire to our server. All of these basic 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.

Interesting! Hope Apple gets some mechanism against the pirates soon! App Store is clearly a big business.
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