I am on an anti-piracy project. I am trying to re-identify devices based on their UDID. But I am wondering if jailbroken devices are hiding the real UDID and instead using a random generated one.
Is there an other way to identify a device? Perhaps some kind of cookie? Or an other Id/Hardwarehash?
Or can I get the UDID on a reliable way?
Thx for all answers!
Don't waste your time.
Focus on making the app convince your users to spend money on it and don't worry about piracy. There are lots and many apis, tricks and methods to foil piracy and all of them are overcome in a short time.
The idea of a cracker is to show they are smarter than you. So only way to "fight" them is to take their audience away. And that you do by making a great product that users are willing to pay for.
Can't really be done. There is a jailbroken app called UDID faker (also a few others), which will generate a random UDID. Also, because jailbreakers have access to terminal, every feature of the hardware can be altered.
If a cracker knows what they are doing, which they ALL do, then your service will be blown wide open within a couple of days, if not hours.
If Apple can't detect and prevent this, with an army of extremely talented programmers, why do you think you will fare better?
If you could solve the piracy issue, you wouldn't be making an app, you'd be contracted by Microsoft.
Related
I am a member of a gliding club with 150 members, and we want to have our own iPhone app. Requiring a member login, the app would be usable only by members of the club, and it would be used by an estimated 20-30 people.
Is it even possible to disribute such an app to non-jailbroken iPhones? According to my research:
It wouldn't be accepted on the App Store due to "limited audience".
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
Ad hoc distribution would be fine for us except for the expiration time associated with apps distributed in the manner.
Are we at a dead end?
Thanks.
Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I didn't just ask Apple directly: I did, and their answer was, "We are unable to advise you with respect to the Apple Developer Program that best fits your needs."
I'm not 100% on your question.
But depending on your requirement, pretty much everything you need can be achieved as a web app, with the correct coding behind it i.e. CACHE MANIFEST you could make the app function similar to the a native app, available offline and can be saved to any iOS device through the browser.
Give me a shout if you need more information.
Hope it helps
Gary
You could always try to make the app a little more "global"? Perhaps offer some free stuff for Joe Bloggs to use, but tucked away you have your real motive... that way you can get it released legitimately.
I've seen some real disasters in the app store that shouldn't have made it, and I'm sure Apples screening isn't as intense as we might think. (example: that flash light application, when pressing a sequence of buttons it would enable free tethering).
Best of luck!
Yup. You seem to have all the options laid out pretty clearly, and there's no other way to do it. Except developing for android, and just distributing the application freely and without arbitrary restrictions.
Sorry.
Ad-hoc distribution would give you about 90 days expiration time, i think, whereas enterprise would give you a year. Though gaining enterprise status in the eyes of apple is easier said than done.
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
You don't have to be a company to apply for the enterprise account, you just need to be an organisation with a DUNS number.
I just was looking at some of the cracked applications. I want to know how can we encrypt our application from being cracked so easily. I also saw a video tutorial to crack the application using a simple software.
Is there any way to protect the paid app from crackers?
Many Thanks,
Nav
Implementing protection on your side is risky. You could detect a modified binary or disabled signature checking and disable some features (like Game Center), but there is a slight risk of penalizing and dissatisfying a real customer, which IMHO is worse. Focus on creating a great app instead, and you could convert a "pirate" to a customer.
There are some expensive libraries to protect the app.
But, in my opinion, since a pirated copy should not be treated as a lost sale, the price of such libraries it's not worth.
edit: i just found anticrack that has a reasonable price
Some of our application is already in AppStore...
But suddenly one thing comes into my mind, that I want to clear before submitting my next application.
The thing is : As a programmer's point of view, should we require to handle if iPhone Device is jailbreaked ? If yes, then how we can tackle with this ?
Thanks in advance....
On a general note, jail-breaking the device is an issue between the user, Apple and potentially the carrier. You are not a side in this relationship, and the user has no contractual obligations to you with regards to their device.
You could choose to attempt detecting jail-broken devices in an attempt to prevent piracy of your app. However:
If the device is jail-broken, there's nothing you can do to reliably verify it's not jail-broken, since none of the OS APIs (including networking) is guaranteed to function as you expect. Your code could be running in a non-jail-broken simulation on top of jail-broken device.
Of course, you could check by attempting to do one of the things you currently know Apple actively prevents apps from doing. However, there's no guarantee that Apple is not going to allow that particular action in future. And, there's the chance that your app might get rejected because you are attempting to do something prohibited by Apple.
There is no official criteria from Apple on what constitutes a jail-broken device and what does not. And even if there was, you are not guaranteed to be notified in a timely manner (or at all) by Apple if they decide to change any such criteria. But even assuming you do get notified somehow, you can't update your app quick enough to avoid falsely detected jail-broken devices, thus potentially denying access to your app to legitimate users.
If you would like to cut off a large group of users, then sure, go ahead and require it.
Unless your application specifically requires it, there should be no reason to force users to have a jailbroken iPhone or a non-jailbroken iPhone.
If you program is legitimate (no private API calls etc), then you should not concern yourself with JB. You don't need to handle anything differently if the users phone has been JB'd. If it has, and your software doesn't run (say memory issues because they are using backgrounder to run 2 other things) then that's their problem not yours. Make your code well behaved, not leak memory, dump cache's etc with memory warnings, and you should be fine.
As you asked for the "programmer's point of view", I'd say: make sure your app runs on as many devices as possible.
Meaning: as long as you app is safe to run on an iPhone whether it's JB or not, I wouldn't care.
One thing I have found, at least early on (not seen it for a while) is that most reports I got of strange behaviour with my app (vConqr) turned out to be from people with jailbroken phones.
That's not to say I think that's good reason to block them. But if you do any sort of custom crash reporting, or other diagnostics it could be useful to log the fact to save time on troubleshooting.
Do a search on the Internet. You'll find several articles that shows some ways you can detect a pirated app. I make no claim on their effectiveness, but I do use some of these in my own apps. These techniques do not try to detect if a phone is jailbroken; they focus on detecting if your app has been tampered with.
We're days away from submitting our first app to the appstore and
last night I was horrified to hear that it does not work on
jailbroken devices. I got a few seconds with the device and saw the OS version, and free memory available (36MB, I guess that's low).
Should I care?
Presumably jailbreak users can buy the app and write scathing reviews.
If so and jailbroken iPhones are common, then the iPhoneJB becomes a de facto shadow-platform that I'm obliged to support.
EDIT
I got some ball park figures, sounds like I should care about the new de facto shadow platform. So either I can try reducing memory requirements and cross my fingers, or get out the credit card and go get me another iPhone to jailbreak.
With around 2.3 million jailbroken iPhones, it is a significant portion of the market. I have a jailbroken iPhone, but most of my apps are from the App Store. I vote yes.
This is a similar issue to what many web developers run into: should they support Internet Explorer 6? While as of this writing 14.9% of the market still uses IE6, many web developers choose not to support it because it is difficult and takes too much time. My own experience was that supporting IE6 caused 50% of my work; that's obviously not a good trade-off.
As Jergason mentioned, there are 2.3 million jailbroken iPhones. Obviously that's a large market. But compare that with the 30 million iPhones total sold as of March 2009. You could probably find better numbers to compare, but assuming those numbers are roughly accurate, less than 10% of the market is jailbroken. Look at how much work, money, etc. it's going to take to support jailbroken phones. I don't know how much work it would take, but when it comes to money, my guess is that simply the cost of getting a jailbroken iPhone to test on will be more than 10% of your revenue (iPhone dev tends to be a small-scale operation, but I don't know the nature of your product so I could be way off-base here).
So my vote is neither yes nor no: do the research and get more detailed stats than I've provided here. When you have your information, don't spend a larger percentage of your revenue supporting a segment of the market than that segment is as a percentage of the whole.
Of course you don't have to support anyone you don't want to! Ultimately, as others have noted, it's a business decision.
In my experience, you'll spend a disproportionate amount of time supporting users with jailbroken handsets. I spent more than twenty hours tracking down one problem that only affected jailbroken phones and even then only found the solution entirely by accident.
Having said that, some of my most enthusiastic (or at least vocal!) users have jailbroken handsets.
At the time of writing, about 25% of users of my free version have a jailbroken handset and 10% for the paid version.
In the end I try to support all users but I do put a higher priority on users with vanilla handsets. I'd draw the line at users of cracked versions, but I have no reason to suspect that's the case.
Incidenally, technically you'd be in breach of your iPhone Developer Program agreement if you used a jailbroken handset. And 36Mb sounds like a lot of available memory for anything other than a 3GS.
The accepted answer to this question seems fine, but I thought I'd add one more (technical) issue to consider.
If you don't at least test your app on jailbroken devices, you may not be aware of some security vulnerabilities. If your app contains any kind of sensitive information, you might want to make sure it can't be easily accessed on a jailbroken device. This might include protecting users' data, or protecting the corporate data on the back end.
Jailbroken phones allow a user to ssh into the phone, and browse any file on the filesystem. The sandbox is nullified (App Store apps will still be limited to their own sandboxes, but non App Store apps will be able to read and write the sandboxes of other apps, including App Store apps).
NSUserDefaults used to store sensitive information, for example, are easily exploited on a jailbroken device.
Even the keychain can be subverted on jailbroken phones.
It would be nice if you didn't have to worry about this, but at least through iOS 6, you really do need to worry about it. So far, Apple has not been able to (or maybe doesn't want to) completely prevent jailbreaking, so it's a real-world vulnerability. Ignoring it is probably not doing your clients or users any favors.
Do your market research. Do you expect to sell to alot of users with jail broken iPhones? Then you need to decide how important that revenue is to you...
What does it mean that I have to "apply"? Can day say: "No, we don't like your nose. Do something else!"? Did they do that in the past?
I've been investing now two full months worth about 20.000 USD on learning for iPhone programming, and I didn't apply yet...
I've never heard of them rejecting an application for developer license. But I've heard plenty of stories of them rejecting code. That's the much larger risk with Apple's stranglehold on the iPhone marketplace.
There is no reason for them not to accept you as a iPhone developer. There is no situation that I know of where they have denied the application provisioning for testing out on the iPhone. They can and will deny your app submission to the app store in some cases. Usually those cases include:
Using copyrighted assets which you do not have a license for
Competing with one of their apps (mail client was the only one I know of)
No value added (yet another "flashlight" app - pretty rare)
Opening the iPhone to scripting attack through download.
Does not conform to their UI guides
The last of these is the trickiest. A friend of mine had his app rejected because he used a UI widget in an unexpected way. This is pretty subjective IMO but they did tell him exactly why they denied it and accepted it when he fixed the issue.
Also about the 20,000, I can't agree here. In addition to learning and bettering yourself as a programmer, you are assuming that you would be paid for every off hour you spend learning - not very realistic.
Apple has a right to not accept your app at their wish, so you have to take a risk.
Yes they could. That's the risk behind developing for any tightly locked down environment.
Of course in practice they are unlikely to reject you for no reason.
And you're already taking a gigantic risk by investing $20k into iPhone development. I can't help wondering if this is a saturated market, although there have been a few well publicised success stories, everybody and his dog are now working on a bejeweled clone, and lets face it, even people who buy iphones are going to be looking a reduction in spending on pointless trivia soon with the market the way it is