App Developer: Android Designed For Piracy

Following news this week of a game developer who turned the Android version of a game free because of piracy concerns, software developer Matt Gemmell has written a lengthy post explaining why he thinks Android apps are laboring under a broken business model. "People have to get paid. There has to be a revenue stream. You can’t reliably have that revenue stream if the platform itself and the damaged philosophy behind it actively sabotages commerce. If you want a platform to be commercially viable for third-party software developers, you have to lock it down. Just like in real life, closing the door and locking it helps make sure that your money remains yours. Bad behaviour has to be more difficult than good behaviour - and good behaviour means paying for your software." He also has some harsh arguments about some of the assumptions and philosophies underpinning the an industry built on an open platform. "Nerds like to say that people care about choice at that level. Nerds are wrong. Nerds care about choice, and nerds are such a tiny minority of people that nobody else much cares what the hell they think. Android is designed with far too much nerd philosophy, and open is gravy to those people because it’s synonymous with customization. ... Open is broken as a money-making platform model, unless you’re making the OS or the handsets. Most of us aren't doing that."

This has been fixed

[itsphilip]

People are casually forgetting that Google introduced the option to DRM your apps with Jelly Bean and beyond. This is a problem that has essentially been fixed, especially as manufacturers roll out the new version of Android (which is the real problem with Android: that might never happen in the case of many phones). It's a year out probably before lots of people are actually running Jelly Bean, but the process has begun.

Re:Settings, enable apps from "unknown sources"

[oakgrove]

In contrast on many Android devices rooting is unnecessary, just going into settings and allowing apps from "unknown sources".

Oh, for the love of GAWD! You mean people can actually do what they want with the device they bought and own? What'll those crazy Googlers think of next?

Re:Why does Windows work then?

[cyber-vandal]

Valve, Blizzard, Winscribe, SAP, Adobe, VMWare, AutoCAD, Oracle, McAfee, Norton, Kaspersky,Roxio, Cyberlink, Intuit ad infinitum. Not a hard list to compile.

Re:Wait a sec...

[Zaelath]

Looks to me like it's gone from $1 to free malware.

Unless the dev can explain a reason why a game needs:
        retrieve running apps
        Allows the app to retrieve information about currently and recently running tasks. Malicious apps may discover private information about other apps.

Other than the obvious reason that it wants to know everything you're running on your phone to report back to the developer.

Fuck him and his shitty 30 year old game.