Implementing an anti-piracy method

#1 anything can be implemented into iTGB as you have the sources.
Its only a matter of if you are able to do it or not.

Likely nobody here has used it as the creator only hands it out to people with a game on the store already.

#2 I just hit the Donate button for both MAS and AC and he sent me the full source code for both. It looks fairly straightforward to implement, but then again, I'm no whiz at Xcode...

But the jailbreak scene - and therefore, the pirate scene - is unfortunately pretty lively, according to his statistics, so I'm gonna find a way to slap it together before it's submitted to Apple.

I'm not going to throw five weeks of work out the window for anything. I suggest that everyone give this a look.

#3 I'm not sure if protection will do much about it.
It will only encourage them to focus on yours for "fame".

I think what might be just as usefull is detecting that it was cracked and inform the user where to get the real one and to support it to make feature xy happen thats planned for the next update for example

#4 This protection is something more than the usual tips, Marc. Just don't mention if you use it, delay the response and it WILL be difficult for them to know for sure if they really cracked your app. There are apps using it which haven't been cracked.

#5 I am willing to purchase an extra license of AC for someone here with the knowledge and capability of making it interoperable with TorqueScript. Basically, I want to be able to access whether or not my game has been cracked and therefore turn it into a trial/lite version. Please contact me if you're capable and interested.

Thanks.

#6 I highly recommend against making it interoperable with TS
If you use it, do it from source

Using it from TS is like presenting it on the plate as TS is not compiled to native platform code.

#7 I wouldn't go with such a cheap solution. A $50 anti-crack solution would not be worthwhile and would be easily broken by any cracker worth their salt.

But tbh with you, not many people crack iPhone games.. sure, there are some, but not as much as other platforms.

#8

Quote:
But tbh with you, not many people crack iPhone games.. sure, there are some, but not as much as other platforms.

Do you have anything to back that up? Pinch Media, who runs iPhone analytics, says the following:

Quote:
Today, certain applications are stolen twenty times as often as they’re legitimately purchased. Theft of three-to-four times daily sales is typical.

www.pinchmedia.com/blog/jailbroken-phone-and-cracked-application-stats-released/

I'm not to the point yet where I want to implement anti-cracking techniques, but I am definitely going to use some, especially if it is only a donation $15-$50. I figure something is better than nothing. I'm hoping that Raphael will also follow-up with how successful this particular technique is.

#9 Justin is absolutely right - any copy protection scheme is better than no copy protection scheme at all. Especially with the AC developer noting that there hasn't been one reported copy of an application with his protection scheme being cracked. That's very encouraging. Even if it eventually gets cracked by some super hacker, it's not easy to do for the casual user to throw the app into a simple cracking utility like Crackopulous (sp?).

I don't know if you're new to the scene, Adam, but iPhone app piracy is disgustingly rampant. There are reports of some developers with a 70/30 ratio of pirated-to-purchased, and that's very discouraging for a struggling indie like myself.

When Apple first announced that it would use FairPlay, I was very encouraged to develop. After all, I was previously developing for Windows Mobile devices, and one of my games proudly got its own keygen from some hacker in China, and I went from 25 sales a month to less than 1 per month. However, FairPlay is not enough. If anything, they should take lessons from Qualcomm's BREW 2.0 - the entire application is encrypted with a digital signature. Change one byte and the whole file will fail to decrypt and therefore fail to run.

Like I said, I'll pay for someone's copy for the code and instructions. Is there anyone willing to join me in getting it implemented into their game? I'd like to add a "silent lite" version into my game if it's detected to be cracked.

#10 I think this technique needs for the crackers to start from scratch with each app, so when it finally is cracked, use the next generation. The real test would be to make something insanely popular, like a vomit simulator or something.

#11 Would be all so much simpler if apple would not require the apps to be handed in "open for idiots" and instead would allow protecting the actual app

#12 We've been asking for that for ages. Have you reported your enhancement request?

#13 Well, with a little understanding of what his program actually does and figuring out where I was to embed the few simple lines of code, I was able to chain it so that it would fall back to a "lite" version if the program was modified in any way.

A $20 donation to this guy and/or any simple method of detecting change is worth the few hundred or thousand copies that would have gotten lost from some 13-year-old with a cracking utility, then posting it on the web for all to grab.

I'm surprised there were no takers for my request. I would have really sprung an extra copy for someone to help me figure it out, but I guess I saved myself $20 and figured it out myself.

#14 Well, I've already donated :)