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Does In-App Purchase works on an iOS pirated application?

Being a developer, I was thinking about the potential following use-case:

  • Some internet user install my application by pirating it
  • I let him play with it
  • After a while, once he is convinced of the interest of the application, I display a pop-up:

This application is not free. You have not purchased it. Please buy it now.
Cancel - Purchase

If he accepts, I display an In-App Purchase dialog.
If he does not, I disable the key feature of the application.

It seems (slightly) more effective than simply asking someone who just pirated an app to go buy it on the App Store.

Community
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Guillaume
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    I think this is a bit fascinating - can the pirating process be done in a way that a developer can count on still getting a good transaction through the app store. My gut tells me no, but perhaps someone has a more technical answer why it can't work (or doesn't in practice) – bmike Jan 03 '12 at 00:28
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    I wouldn't count on ever receiving that money since you would be violating the App Store agreement. Also, relatively few iPhone users jailbreak their phones (compared to Android users) and those who do are probably much less likely to pay for apps anyway. – titaniumdecoy Jan 03 '12 at 00:31
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    If you are planning for this and you want to fight the piracy battle (which is likely going to be a waste of time) you might think about releasing your app to the jailbreak community as a paid app on Cydia or have this trial mode built in to the Jailbreak version of the app, the payment would have to go through some other means though. – Chris Wagner Jan 03 '12 at 00:35
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    @titaniumdecoy : "[…] since you would be violating the App Store agreement" - can you point any specific part of the agreement? Pirating user definitively is, but I don't see how the developer is. If Apple accepted to validate the App with the In-App Purchase item clearly describing itself, it might be ok. – Guillaume Jan 03 '12 at 00:38

3 Answers3

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It's possible that the dialog you're thinking of wouldn't be accepted by the app review team. It's hard to say. But what you can do is what a lot of apps do, which is provide your app for free, with limited functionality (be careful here, there are restrictions on what you can do in this regard), and IAP to upgrade to the full version. The simplest example would be games that let you play a few levels for free, and then buy the rest of the levels with a single IAP transaction.

Lily Ballard
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  • Could he instead seed a "cracked" version of his apps to the pirates directly, bypassing the whole App Store altogether (for the "pirate" version of the app). Of course, this risks being discovered and replaced with the "normal" App Store version… – Cocoatype Jan 03 '12 at 01:41
  • Not and have in-app purchase works, that needs to be reviewed by the review team. – Kendall Helmstetter Gelner Jan 03 '12 at 01:49
  • To avoid any question, you could set the test threshold to longer than the app review team will likely even be looking at it. – Old McStopher Feb 17 '13 at 16:46
  • @OldMcStopher: Trying to deliberately sidestep the review team is never a good idea. – Lily Ballard Feb 17 '13 at 19:51
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An interesting idea. What I would do is have an in-app purchase meant for something else in the app, that the app team could review - but that on a pirated version could also be presented as a way to pay for the application too but would use the app store approved payment.

Kendall Helmstetter Gelner
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Unfortunately there are ways to bypass the In-App Purchases, so I wouldn't count on that.

If the user wants to use your app without paying for it, I'm quite sure the Purchasing-Prompt won't prevent him from doing so either.

Mobiletainment
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