Just a day after its launch, there are already discussions of two ways of pirating apps: one due to nefarious intent, the other due to lazy programming.
On the latter front, a number of apps aren’t set up to properly check if you downloaded them, and so can be fooled. When you purchase an app through the Mac App Store, you get a digital receipt which shows that you downloaded it. Apps are meant to check that before they run. As released here, Angry Birds, for instance, checks that there is a receipt but not what app it’s for, allowing for you to transfer one from a free app, and get away with piracy. This is appears to be a problem on the dev’s side, not Apple. Here’s how to stop it.
On a more serious front, a group called Hackulous have cracked the security with a system called Kickback, which they’re planning on releasing next month. Member Dissident explains:
“We don’t want to release kickback as soon as the [Mac App] Store gets released. I have a few reasons for that. Most of the applications that go on the Mac App Store [in the first instance] will be decent, they’ll be pretty good. Apple isn’t going to put crap on the App Store as soon as it gets released. It’ll probably take months for the App Store to actually have a bunch of crappy applications and when we feel that it has a lot of crap in it, we’ll probably release Kickback. So we’re not going to release Kickback until well after the store’s been established, well after developers have gotten their applications up. We don’t want to devalue applications and frustrate developers.”
We here at EiC do not condone piracy. Anything you do is your own damn fault.
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My question is this. In this piracy war who is the real pirate. The people who download apps that they didn’t pay for to make sure the app is worth the money the dev is asking for or the developer that makes claims that aren’t true or misleading and then has lots of friends or fake iTunes accounts and give their app 5 stars to lure people into buying an app that is worthless?
I don’t know why they haven’t instituted a system where it is trial based with full functionality. There are many MAC apps that allow this if you go to the third party sites. This is they way I prefer to test drive the software. As to the iPhone APPS, there is so much crap out there it’s not funny. I don’t condone piracy but I like the fact that sites exist that allow you to download the software with no strings attached. If you like it, then go to the developer’s site and purchase a license.