Application Licensing vs Copy protection in Android

Question

I'm preparing the release of an application and checking Application Licensing I wonder if it's worth the extra effort required to adapt the application to the licensing system. Because, from what I read, the licensing system is also crackeable.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Everything is crackable anyway. The purpose of protecting the application is more to slow down the pirate's work or to make the cracking effort unworthy. This excellent article describes this way better than I do.

It is true that at first glance it is a lot of work to set the Application Licensing up, but once done once it's really OK. I think it worth it at the end as:

• the copy protection is deprecated anyway, and will disappear

• the Application Licensing API works very well, I don't have to complain about it (but it is sometimes annoying in debug mode. When debugging the best is to bypass the license checking in my opinion)

So the short answer to you question is yes, to me. But it can only be an opinion.

Should you switch from Copy protection to Application licensing, don't forget to use ProGuard to obfuscate your APKs. Similarly, this is not unbreakable, but it makes any cracking attempt harder. It is integrated in the Android framework, and this is basically no work (plenty of posts are available on this on Stack Overflow)