Getting cracked

A while back we setup a Google Alert for "'Abby Craby' iphone". Strangely, many of the hits are coming from sites in China, Russia, Korea, and the like that are hosting cracked versions of our game. How silly that people are expending the effort to crack a few dollars worth of game. A little digging turned up that it's not much effort. Because of the way the low level software in iPhone and iPod Touch works it's easy for hacking teams to jailbreak phones. This inevitably leads to scripts that crack purchased applications. These scripts are script-kiddie easy to use.

Many developers include usage tracking software in their applications that "call home" to a server on the net. These developers are now tracking what percentage of their applications have been cracked. What developers do with this information is up to the developer of course.

It's a good reason to release a free application with an advertisement model I suppose.