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Comment by krautsourced | Hacker News Reader

Was there no registration or anything to join the servers? If they have a browser game business, there must have been some sort of account management in place already? Are they going to re-release with a different user scheme, or are they reimbursing customers now? In any case, it's pretty shitty for them. Tbh I wasn't even aware that piracy was such a big issue in iOS. Good to know.

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Precisely. Surely you can give each purchaser a unique code (hash of transaction number?) to connect to the server with, and only allow one connection per code at a time. (I don't do iOS dev, but I assume this is trivial.)

If they can tell who's pirated vs who hasn't (I assume they can), it seems like something is missing. Is it too cynical to suspect a marketing ploy to grab headlines?

They don't necessarily know who has pirated and who hasn't. They might just see that there are e.g. 100K people registered on their servers, and they only had 10K sales.

I don't think it's trivial.

The code given to Apple is not modified at any point before sent to a device. The code is also duplicated onto itunes, which is how you can so easily crack it.

The only way I know of to identify each and every purchaser is to use in-app-purchases.

Well it would be a server side check. But even a rudimentary IP address check would be fine to ensure one connection at a time.

It is all a bit odd I have to admit.

Aside from barring users who are legitimately sharing a connection (and not even pirating your app)...

How does this actually solve the problem? Pirates are really unlikely to be colocated with the person who let them have an illegal copy of your app.

The problem is that it is hard (impossible) to tell from within an iOS app if it has been purchased legitimately. If you want to give users the convenience to buy the app for $.99 and then start playing, then I don't think you have a chance to add any meaningful validation. I wonder how it would've worked with subscription IAPs. I would guess that they are a big psychological problem to potential legit players. This would have been a great chance to find out.

In my experience, piracy on iOS varies a lot with the region, too. The majority of my analytics come from China with only one(!) copy ever being sold there.

I have seen a lot of small shops in Thailand that feature iMac's with iTunes accounts that are loaded with apps. People go there, pick out the apps they want, leave their phone there for an hour or so and then pick it up again for a very low fee.

I'm not sure if all of those phones are jailbroken, or if they just use a single iTunes account to synchronise with hundreds of phones.

I believe the restriction is that each iTunes account can be synced to 10 devices, and each device can sync with 5 iTunes accounts. So it's very likely that those shops are jailbreaking the phones and installing pirated apps.

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