App Theft!
by Dan Pereira · in iTorque 2D · 04/08/2009 (7:06 pm) · 25 replies
So my app has been stolen by no less than 15,000 people on file sharing sites. I'm not going to say I've never *evaluated* a development tool or an occasional operating system, or that I'm some kind of saint, but to me stealing a $0.99 app developed by indies is just low. Am I going to have to put DRM on my apps so I can feed my family?
#22
05/29/2009 (12:57 pm)
I made some games with Unity with my partners and we put in code a tracking when the player first opens the app. We were getting high numbers and we thought sales were through the roof. We then did some research and saw that out app was pirated on a few of those sites where people can get paid apps for free. Stinks heh. 
#23
Needs jailbreaking to pirate, yes.
Option 1 will be useful for some types of games. Buy opponent packs and map packs (make it more than one in each case, and people will be willing to click that button RIGHT NOW).
#2: Yes, there are well-published ways. The straight-forward method is also easy to crack.
It works like this:
Open the Info.plist, check for a certain string. Its presence means it's hacked.
To be an utter bastard, you could make several directories in your published game where one file is named Info.plist, but is actually, say, the player's spritesheet, and another named after the string(s) you normally look for.
Then you have one string constant somewhere in the app with this name. If hackers use the automated tools to overwrite the string (like they do now), all sorts of delightful things happen to the game :)
05/29/2009 (1:06 pm)
@Bret:Needs jailbreaking to pirate, yes.
Option 1 will be useful for some types of games. Buy opponent packs and map packs (make it more than one in each case, and people will be willing to click that button RIGHT NOW).
#2: Yes, there are well-published ways. The straight-forward method is also easy to crack.
It works like this:
Open the Info.plist, check for a certain string. Its presence means it's hacked.
To be an utter bastard, you could make several directories in your published game where one file is named Info.plist, but is actually, say, the player's spritesheet, and another named after the string(s) you normally look for.
Then you have one string constant somewhere in the app with this name. If hackers use the automated tools to overwrite the string (like they do now), all sorts of delightful things happen to the game :)
#24
05/29/2009 (4:17 pm)
Aren't there already third-party anti-piracy kits to attach to your iPhone app already? Is it possible to link it up with the pre-compiled code before packaging? I'd be interested in investing in such an SDK.
#25
05/30/2009 (2:07 pm)
The 3rd party solutions so far require them to take your source and put the game up for sale. None of them come as an SDK we can use, I think, except one which calls home. Some call home AND require you to give them your source. The word on the Apple forums is "no", usually ;)
Torque Owner Bret Patterson
1. Make in-game purchasable content with the new iphone 3.0 OS. Then you will only be able to get new content via buying in game. Of course they can still hack your data files to enable the new content unless you dynamically download the content.
2. Is there a way to validate the signature of your applications bundle from within Objective C? If so then you could disable your application if the signature of your application was invalid. This would prevent any hack that modified the app bundle unless they also modified the executable to disable the signature validation.
I'm not sure if #2 is even possible, however it's probably the strongest method your going to get.
I'm shooting for taking advantage of #1 heavily by introducing micro-transactions to enable content on a per device basis. I'm considering #2 if I have to figure out if it's possible.
Also is it possible to pirate the application without jail breaking your phone? If not then a minimum OS compile target above the last jail broken version might help prevent piracy?