Discussion - Reducing App Store Piracy

This week, I'd like to throw something out for discussion. These are ideas that have come up in the course of real life discussions with other app developers. I need to preface this by saying that I have not implemented any of these ideas, and that I'm only putting the ideas out there to encourage you to think about and discuss alternatives.

It surprises me that in an ecosystem of 99 cent apps, piracy rates are still incredibly high. For this article the assumption is that as an iOS developer, you are able to detect at runtime, if your app has been pirated. There are multiple ways to do this, but the technical details of which are not required for this article so I'm going to skip them.

One of the requirements to install a pirated version of an iOS app on a device, is that the device needs to be jailbroken. If the device has been jailbroken, then certain security features will have been disabled. This makes it possible for apps to do things on the device, that Apple doesn't allow under normal circumstances.

This means, that a normally well behaved app, could be made to 'go rogue' when it detects that it has been stolen by the user. For instance, a stolen version of your app, could make a phone call to a charge per call phone number that charges the cost of the app to the users phone bill, therefore recovering the cost of the app for the developer. Similarly, the app could send a premium text message out, also charging the cost to the user's phone bill.

Now, I'm not proposing that you actually build this into your apps, as it's almost definitely the wrong way to go about building up your business¹. As iOS developers, is it not part of our job to educate users on the dangers of using pirated apps? The above ideas can be used in the same way we've warned against pirating desktop apps due to the dangers of viruses and other malware. Common users should be encouraged to live in Apple's walled garden as is indeed a great place for users and developers to be.

¹ A user that has pirated your app is still a potential customer and needs to be treated as such.