The great danger in the fight against piracy is that it's so damn interesting. You can spend months playing cat and mouse with the people trying to crack your schemes, ratcheting up the complexity to insane levels, and every time you come up with a new scheme and get it working you'll feel like a million bucks because you Won(tm).
But the people on the other side feel the same way, there are more of them, and in reality, they're not actually hurting your business as badly as your delusions tell you they are - none of them were ever going to buy your shit anyway.
Add features, improve your design, fix bugs, or tweak your shitty description and screen shots in the app store (which, in my experience, will affect sales for most apps more than the first three factors put together). Literally any time that you devote to copy protection is wasted, unless you're Angry Birds (and even then I'm not sure) you're not reaching anywhere near a high enough percentage of the people that would happily pay for your product to worry about the ones that would rather just take it.
I agree. The arms race of building 'better' copy protections instead of continous improvement of your product won't do you any good.
I think the main key is deciding on the investment. The amount of time put into those things can be expressed in money. So this poses two questions:
1. Would I be willing to pay the given amount to someone else to do it. If not and I still want to do it I should at least admit that this is for personal ambition and not for the product. It's OK everybody likes a challenge.
2. Will it improve my sales? Again the money. What stands to gain from this. How much effort is OK. Perhaps the simple checksum in addition to the common cmp jne check is enough to get a few sales. But that's about it for products with a market where uncracked time is not king. Look somewhere above for the gamasutra article about game releases and the value of time. And I think the time constraint doesn't work for many products.
The idea for one of my projects was to say "if you are able to crack it you can keep it". If someone spent the time and has the ability to do it, it's fine with me. Surely this is no viable solution for most products. But I'm curious how it will work out...
Agree, playing hide and seek with crackers is waste of time. I decided to make the anti-piracy protection trivial in the latest version of my software. I just wrote a installation date into an .ini file.
I want customers that love the software and are happy to pay the price I ask. Software piracy can be solved by social means, not technical means.
But the people on the other side feel the same way, there are more of them, and in reality, they're not actually hurting your business as badly as your delusions tell you they are - none of them were ever going to buy your shit anyway.
Add features, improve your design, fix bugs, or tweak your shitty description and screen shots in the app store (which, in my experience, will affect sales for most apps more than the first three factors put together). Literally any time that you devote to copy protection is wasted, unless you're Angry Birds (and even then I'm not sure) you're not reaching anywhere near a high enough percentage of the people that would happily pay for your product to worry about the ones that would rather just take it.