> Um there is a culture of piracy *everywhere*. :} > > If you are saying that because you think most people are pirating Android > apps... I think your perception of things is probably pretty off. I know > lots of people who have Android devices, and none of them even think of > turning on the option to install from external sources, let alone go out and > find pirated apps.
You're correct. My perception could very well be off. Without a doubt I see VERY high piracy rates on my software in Android market (see here: bit.ly/9ZYrh7). In my paranoid mind I've always distributed this tendency towards piracy uniformly across the Android user base. I think that it's a good point that this is likely NOT true though. As many have pointed out, piracy is motivated by different things, including the inability to purchase from the market, over-priced apps, etc. These motivations don't exist everywhere or for every app, and so my guess is that there are piracy hot spots around the globe. Actually, that would be a very interesting study. I think that I may even have the raw data to do it for my own app. My app tracks coarse- grained (city-level) location information, and I think that I could extract that same information from Google Checkout records. I smell a weekend going up in smoke... :) Dave On Aug 25, 1:04 pm, Dianne Hackborn <hack...@android.com> wrote: > On Wed, Aug 25, 2010 at 8:13 AM, keyeslabs <keyes...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Again, my contention is that something stronger than obfuscation is > > needed to lock the APK down. OS-level APK encryption support in > > addition to license verification. I would like to see us get to the > > point that users must choose to root the phone (similar to Apple) in > > order to use pirated apps. Better yet, users must root the phone and > > in so doing remove the legal ability to access some desirable piece of > > software. > > Yeah there we are. As far as I can see, the next step in preventing piracy > is to not allow users to install apps outside of Market at all. > > We're not going to do that. > > If there are other suggestions that will actually make things harder without > doing that, I would certainly like to hear them. At this point people need > to modify apps; once they are doing that, there aren't too many more things > to do except make it harder to remove the illegal use check code out of the > app. > > > I realize that it's easy for me to rant on about what I want, and very > > difficult for Google to strike the right balance between open and > > lucrative. My fear at this point is that we're establishing a culture > > of piracy on Android that is going to be difficult to turn around. > > Um there is a culture of piracy *everywhere*. :} > > If you are saying that because you think most people are pirating Android > apps... I think your perception of things is probably pretty off. I know > lots of people who have Android devices, and none of them even think of > turning on the option to install from external sources, let alone go out and > find pirated apps. > > -- > Dianne Hackborn > Android framework engineer > hack...@android.com > > Note: please don't send private questions to me, as I don't have time to > provide private support, and so won't reply to such e-mails. All such > questions should be posted on public forums, where I and others can see and > answer them. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Android Developers" group. To post to this group, send email to android-developers@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to android-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/android-developers?hl=en
