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Comment by Jyaif | Hacker News Reader

My paid app has gotten between 5k-25k downloads on their store, obviously without me getting a cent. What are my options to hurt them as much as possible?

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You have 2 options:

- Be a partner and publish your paid app there. It then will be paid.

- Submit a DMCA notice: "9.3 DMCA Notices. If Aptoide receives a Notice according to the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Aptoide will immediately remove the Product in question. Such notices shall be directed to Aptoide’s DMCA Agent at abuse.report@aptoide.com." They will then unlist it.

Is this unreasonable? It seems reasonable to me.

Both options suck. There are dozens of sites like these to keep up with. Distribution is one thing, but customer support is a nightmare, particularly since you don't know if you're supporting a legitimate download or not.

DMCA is a nuisance. You have to be big enough to dedicate resources to filing and tracking takedowns, as well as be able to take legal action anywhere in the world for sites that don't respond. It's very easy to clone a pirate site. It's much harder to play whack-a-mole to take one down.

Sorry to be dismissive, but this is basically what the internet is for content creators. There's a reason the *AAs of the world resort to sending automated, often stupid, blanket takedowns -- computers make copying easy.

At work, we've used MarkMonitor to try to solve similar things, which is sometimes useful and sometimes results in our secondary apps getting taken off Google Play.

They've been to court, which presumably means they're publicly accountable, as opposed to pirates who tend to operate anonymously.

I suppose you could send them an Electronic Commerce Directive take-down notice. Probably doesn't hurt them as such, but should get your app removed.

EDIT: The store seems to be somewhat decentralized, with stores being similar to APT repositories. So it may be difficult to target Aptoide directly unless there's a centralized list of stores, in which case I imagine you can get the user's store struck from it. Otherwise you may need to contact the store's hosting provider - which indeed could be a bit of a cat and mouse game.

And now where is exactly the difference to F-Droid?

The FOSS store f-droid also allows to add custom apt-like repositories, which for example CopperheadOS used to add a non-sanctioned patched version of the "signal" app. Moxie doesnt want forks of signal that are also using signal's servers. CopperheadOS did it anyway because signal is not compatible without Google Apps installed (removing google cloud messaging because CopperHeadOS doesnt include Google play services).

As per their 'About page' no difference: "The original F-Droid client app was based on the Aptoide app developed by Roberto Jacinto."

F-Droid is a fork of the original Aptoide project, it seems.

It was forked in 2010, so the the differences after 8 years of separate development are probably quite significant. (But both clients let you add third-party repositories, so in that regard there is no difference.)

signal work just fine without gapps, i am using it on my phone without gapps

If your app relies on server-side functionality to work, you should look into the SafetyNet Attestation API to see if you can block cracked apps from working by having the server refuse to talk to an app if it can't prove it was installed from google's app store.

Yay, one more app I can't install because I want control over my own device.

I've already had to contact a few devs to be able to use paid apps because they thought that root = pirate.

You're in the minority here. The author is saying 25k unpaid/untracked downloads, which certainly the vast majority are pirated.

The attestation API can be used to detect probable root, but that's not the only thing it does. It can be used to detect if an APK is modified(and thus probably cracked) or not. There are various things you can check for and you can allow rooted phones while disallowing modified APKs.

A link to your app's apk is the fourth search result for your user name. Are you going to target duckduckgo too, as they're doing basically the same thing.

Off-topic: your app is one of the few mobile apps that I've bothered purchasing/donating to. Tons of time spent in the original and 2nd version.

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