Apple Thoughts: Combatting Pirates in the High Seas of the App Store

"Last week, the iPhone cracking app-cracking tool, Crackulous, was released, igniting discussions amongst developers and users over App Store security, piracy and how to combat these threats within the confines of Apple's walled-garden. Because of the iPhone SDK, and Apple's Terms of Service for letting apps into the App Store, individual developers are severely limited in what they can actually do, code-wise, to address the issue."

I didn't realize pirating was such an issue at the iTunes App Store until I read this article. Some of the developers are reporting figures such as low as 20% legitimate users. This software from Ripdev works within the constraints of the SDK (they say) so it doesn't violate any of Apple's policies, by creating another shell a "pirate" would have to break through in order to get the application to work. Pricing seems kind of steep, setup fee of US $100 for apps costing less than US $9.99 and US $300 for apps costing more than US $9.99. And they charge a royalty based on number of sales after the initial setup fee is charged. Not sure how many developers are going to be interested in this, but if you do any kind of volume, this might actually keep more of the money in your hands.