RipDev Releases Kali Anti-Piracy Service to Protect iPhone Apps from being Pirated

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Filed Under (Apple iPhone, Smartphones) by admin on 23-02-2009 >> 96 views

Tagged Under : Apple, iPhone

We had reported about a jailbreak app called Crackulous which strips the copy protection from iPhone apps and render them free for distribution.

At that time, we had commented that this was bad news for iPhone developers and that cracking iPhone apps or installing cracked iPhone apps was crossing the line which had resulted in an interesting debate among iPhone Hacks readers.

We now have some good news to report for the iPhone developers. RipDev, the folks behind the Installer app have recently released Kali Anti-Piracy which is a service to protect iPhone apps from being pirated.

RipDev describe Kali Anti-Piracy as follows:

“With Kali Anti-Piracy your application is being wrapped in the additional layer of protection engineered by experts in Mac OS X and iPhone OS architectures, giving potential hackers much harder time in achieving the precious “crack”. Moreover, we are constantly monitoring the current trends and news in the underground hacker communities to make sure Kali AP stays on top of the “competition”.”

They have mentioned that the integration process in also quite simple:

The integration process with your product is quite simple — just follow simple instructions found in the downloadable SDK once you sign up and activate your product on the Developer’s portal. Your product code will be automatically processed by the Kali Anti-Piracy intelligent algorithm in a way that if the product was pirated, it will cease to launch or function properly.

RipDev has also clarified that iPhone apps wrapped with additional layer of protection will be compliant with Apple’s iPhone SDK agreement.

Kali Anti-Piracy uses only documented and allowed calls, therefore, it is fully compliant with the Apple iPhone SDK. Products protected with Kali AP are passing the Apple approval process and are currently successfully selling in the AppStore.

They have also addressed Privacy concerns:

Kali Anti-Piracy is entirely self-contained, and will never “phone home” or otherwise contact the remote servers without your knowledge. We take end user privacy very seriously.

RipDev will be charging an initial setup cost of $100 if iPhone app costs less than or equal to $9.99 on the App Store and $300 if it costs more than $9.99. On top of this RipDev will also charge a small percentage in a tiered structured for each iPhone app that gets downloaded which are using their additional layer of protection.

We are not aware of any iPhone developer to find out if they have found RipDev’s Kali Anti-Piracy software useful.

Though we expect Apple to address this issue in upcoming firmware releases, if iPhone Developers are concerned about their iPhone app getting cracked; this appears to be an interesting option.

Update:

As readers have pointed out this might not be all good news, iPhone developers should do their maths before opting for this solution. If you consider that only a fraction of the iPhone users jailbreak their iPhone and fraction of those users will actually cross the line of installing cracked apps, piracy might not be as widespread to justify paying a percentage for each copy of the iPhone app sold on the App Store for the additional layer of protection.

So Andrew who is an iPhone developer rightly points out: Its “All about economics”. Thanks folks for your feedback.

Please let us know your thought’s about RipDev’s Kali Anti-Piracy Software in the comments below.

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