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Comment by scott_karana | Hacker News Reader

The Anti-Privacy feature is probably a big deal to legitimizing the Play Store in the eyes of iOS devs who worry about Android's large piracy rates.

https://developers.google.com/games/services/android/antipir...

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Piracy on iOS is just as high as it is on Android. The only difference is that Google acknowledged that DRM doesn't work and made a license check option available to developers instead (years ago, nothing new).

We released our game for iOS earlier this year and easily 80% of our users had pirated copies of the game.

Given that only a tiny percentage of iOS users jailbreak, this just means that your game is only being bought by a very small percentage of users.

Users can install software on iOS devices without jailbreaking. The most common method is resigning the software using an enterprise cert (there are plenty of sites on the internet that do this).

I simply don't know: Can't those signing certs be revoked by Apple?

Yes, but how hard is Apple going to chase those certs?

Unless someone is doing something big or strategic to Apple (and random app piracy doesn't qualify, IMO), I just don't see it. Chasing "rogue" enterprise certs is all cost (time, effort, energy, risk of angering legitimate enterprise customers) for little to no benefit.

How much is it? It's astonishing that people bother to pirate iOS games when they hardly cost anything in the first place.

I read a quite plausible explanation on HN about it: Many people in Asia buy iOS devices as a status symbol, but can't really afford anything beyond, so most devices are jailbroken and loaded with pirate app stores. Comparable to the china tablets that already come with pirate app stores.

This post is about IAPs, but I assume the numbers for apps would be quite similar: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AaronIsaksen/20121213/183519/...

assuming it's the same anti-piracy mechanism they use for paid apps (and it looks like it is), then you really shouldn't rely on it. Sometimes it takes hours to report an install as "licensed", and crackers have developed tools (apkmania, i'm looking at you) to automatically strip and recompile apks that contain this license check.

The way to do it would be to give developers an API they can use on a server (something we've been asking for a while), but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Well, it's kind of two-phase. If the license check fails, the Play Games server calls will fail. Which means features like multiplayer just won't work.

I hope you meant "anti-piracy" ;)

As someone who only read the headline, that comment really piqued my interest.

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