How to prevent application thievery (specific to Android applications)?

Posted by Berdon Magnus on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Berdon Magnus
Published on 2010-04-27T03:20:00Z Indexed on 2010/04/27 5:23 UTC
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Filed under:

android

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shareware

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piracy-protection

Hey,

I was wondering what the most effective way of preventing people from stealing my application (downloading a copy of the .apk online rather than buying it).

I've spent a lot of time on one in particular (Droidbox) and won't be releasing Sync until I can guarantee that the people who are providing illegal copies of the pro version aren't able to.

Anyone implemented this? I've tried checking my package signature verses an the signature of an unsigned copy but it appears to be the same - perhaps I'm doing something incorrectly here. I'm unsure whether people actually distribute the signed .apk in which case I don't think signature validation would work to begin with...

Please note, this question is specific to Android Marketplace Applications - the difference being, application delivery is out of my hands and I have no way of linking between a legitimate purchase and an illegal download.

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