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Android Market apps now have to check in with licensing servers to confirm legitimacy

Filed under: Security, Google, Android

The Android Market is doing away with its current copy protection scheme for apps, because breaking protection to pirate the apps is a little bit too easy for the comfort of the developers who sell their software in the market. To protect its relationship with the all-important dev community, Google has launched a "licensing service" that verifies whether an app was legitimately purchased.

This kind of scheme isn't uncommon, but it's sometimes unpleasant for users. In a perfect world, your Android phone would always have reception, and a licensing server would always be up and running to authenticate the apps you've bought. There are bound to be a few problems, though, and it's not clear how Google will address them. I'm not going to assume the worst, but I do wonder what happens when you have an offline app and you're in a service black hole. Can it run without being able to access the licensing server?

Google could protect developers without checking apps every single time they run, but there are other possible worries, like legitimate apps failing the licensing check due to glitches (a la Microsoft and Windows Genuine Advantage). On the plus side, Google has some of the best server infrastructure in the world, so it's very unlikely these servers will go down for any length of time.

Currently, this type of authentication is available to any developer who wants it, but it's not mandatory. It'll be interesting to see how many app creators start using it right away.

[via Engadget]

Android Market apps now have to check in with licensing servers to confirm legitimacy originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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