> In a nutshell, what I'm hoping LVL can grow into is a system that > packages license verification in a way that is really really hard to > remove. It seems like we've got half of that equation nicely under > way with LVL in its current form.
The sort of anti-piracy system you're after is essentially what games consoles use - it's very easy for the developer, in fact, they need do nothing at all and (for games distributed online) they are piracy proof. But the costs of this system are enormous, and problematically, fall squarely on the device manufacturer (Microsoft/Sony). If Android were to try and adopt this sort of scheme, you can forget about - Competing hardware vendors - Frequent new hardware releases - Cost-competitive devices (ie they'd be more expensive than the iPhone) - Open source Android obviously chose to go down the route of having a competitive hardware and software space, at the cost of having piracy. There is a phone platform that matches the above criteria, the iPhone, but Apple didn't bother to make the investment in security required so you get all the downsides and none of the upsides. > That's not what I was picturing. Isn't there some way that we could > do both? Apps downloaded from market could be encrypted and only > decrypted by the OS when used (in real time, never decrypted and left > as an open APK on the device). This is easily defeated by modifying the (open source!) runtime to dump the decrypted version. Worse, once done it applies to every app. We're back to the universal crack. The reason I keep harping on about strong, app specific code obfuscation etc is precisely because you DO need to encrypt your app but you DON'T want to do it the same way as everyone else, which an Android provided solution would imply. Nothing says there can't be a PC-style reusable toolkit that you can easily integrate into your app, but it'd be provided by third parties rather than the Android project. -- 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
