With the number of apps on the app store soon reaching the big 100.000 it is only logical that piracy continues to flourish. At the beginning of this year a tool named Crackulous promised to make it easy for everyone to become a pirate, claiming to be the solution to a flawed app store. At the time of this writing Crackulous version 0.9 is public and the next version 1.0 is being “in development” for more than half a year.
Piracy is a thorn in the side of all small time iPhone developers who can hope to make around $10 per app per day. Those hard working coders now face the likelyhood of loosing half of their revenue to pirates making it continuously easier to get the apps for free. According to latest numbers of Pinch app to 60% of apps in use are in fact cracked copies.
There are several things that you can do being such a developer who sees a at least a portion of his potential income being stolen.
- cease to protect and consider pirated apps as additional advertisements
- pay hundreds of dollars to a professional protection service
- do some research and collect together methods to detect cracks and modify your app’s behavior if you find it is cracked
- join the AntiCrack community to gain access to our repository and put this into your apps, mix and match, use what you like
- or the fatalistic option is too cease making iPhone apps alltogether
I encourage everyone to do a bit of his own research to understand the techniques that are out there and maybe develop a couple of your own. But for everybody who still wants to try to do at least something we made AntiCrack.
