Android Market Ready to Crack Down on Piracy
taken from droid-life.com

Code: Select allThe latest announcement from the Android team should bring a giant smile to the faces of application developers.  It’s time to finally start cracking down on Android application piracy.  A new licensing service has been provided to devs and should roll out to the market within the next few months…

This simple and free service provides a secure mechanism to manage access to all Android Market paid applications targeting Android 1.5 or higher. At run time, with the inclusion of a set of libraries provided by us, your application can query the Android Market licensing server to determine the license status of your users. It returns information on whether your users are authorized to use the app based on stored sales records.

If you need a translation on that, it’s really just saying that market servers can ping the apps on your device from time to time to make sure it is actually licensed to/paid for by you.  And no, you don’t have to worry about security, battery life, or “the man” watching over your shoulder with this new service.  This is a good thing people.

And time for a quick rant…

If you’ve been in the Android game for a while, you are likely familiar with the abundance of “blackmarket” Android app sites which only ask you to pay a small fee to join in order to get unlimited access to paid apps.  It’s sad, pathetic and obviously illegal, but part of life in general I guess.  The thing that really irritates me is the fact that developers put so much time and energy into work which supports an operating system we all hope will continue to grow past everyone, yet we still have community members willing to undermine them.  Devs need to get paid if this way of life is ever going to progress to the top.  (Damn that sounded preachy!)

That's some BS! What are your thoughts?

I figure if 30% of the Droid owners know about sites like this, they are lucky. I think there are just too many apps out there and all of them can not be supported 100%.

You cant have 8billion apps and complain if one developer is not able to sit at home and just sell his apps for his livelyhood.

Oh well, there will of course be a workaround for it probably. Especially if you have root. Maybe there will be a new cracking organization that comes up and disables that feature in an app. I dont know.

[lifehacker]

New protection wont do a thing, it will be cracked as always. Developers do need to get paid for their work but this wont help them, if anything it will only draw people away. Out of curiosity does anybody know some of these sites the author referred to that ask for a fee to get access to a warez repository?

New protection wont do a thing, it will be cracked as always. Developers do need to get paid for their work but this wont help them, if anything it will only draw people away. Out of curiosity does anybody know some of these sites the author referred to that ask for a fee to get access to a warez repository?

totally agree. if someone really likes an app, they should buy it. i get apps from here to try them out, once i get bored of them or aren't to my expectation i get rid of them as quickly as possible. And if i really like an app, i legitimately download it from the market