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After a long hard work in developing an app, with a creative idea, then put it in the app store. I was shocked that my app was duplicated and reskined. OMG.

those peopple they just change the color theme and the app name then they put our app in their name.

Hense, Is there any technical solution, or an approach to prevent and to secure our app against this violation.

thank you in advance.

azdoud
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    It doesn't make sense to try to find a technical solution. Inform Google instead. – Kayaman Mar 27 '18 at 06:12
  • there are couple of ways. But none of them works *for sure*. You can implement some kind of licensing in your code. So it checks the app APK signature, and then just doesn't allow launching the app. Also you could rewrite your app to NDK. This way it would be much harder to reverse-engineer it. Also make sure you use obfuscation (ProGuard) – Vladyslav Matviienko Mar 27 '18 at 06:13
  • Inform Google I did this, however, it would be better if we close this door of Resking – azdoud Mar 27 '18 at 06:15
  • see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/13854425/how-to-avoid-reverse-engineering-of-an-apk-file and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5991357/how-to-prevent-my-android-apps-from-being-cracked-antilvl – AsfK Mar 27 '18 at 06:15
  • as @VladyslavMatviienko said you can do these things it will secure your code, but still can not prevent your app to reskin, You can patent your design. – Vishal Chhodwani Mar 27 '18 at 06:16

2 Answers2

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First of all, please check whether you enabled ProGuard to obfuscate your code when releasing. If yes, then it is time to switch to DexGuard (a commercial version of ProGuard). From my experience, it is still able to hack an application which turned on ProGuard (if you can read smalli code), but there is no way to attack an application which was protected by DexGuard.

Please refer this for more information: https://www.guardsquare.com/en/dexguard

Cao Minh Vu
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  • Careful here... DexGuard offers good protection level against repacking, but not against reverse engineering. This blog and others in the series will shed some light on what JEB Decompiler can do https://www.pnfsoftware.com/blog/reversing-dexguard/. – Alex Byrde Jul 15 '20 at 17:06
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This is called Reverse engineering because all resources that are reskined so called by you must be first extracted from application so you have to actually reverse engineering which is not completely stoppable how ever you can refer to this question this is what you are looking for

Zain Ul Abidin
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