Apple Thoughts: App Developer Uses New Tool to Combat Pirates

"Like many iPhone developers, Ben Chatelain is frustrated to see cracked versions of his project, Full Screen Web Browser, showing up online. Following the usability suggestions of John Gruber, Ben has chosen to do something about it. The latest version of his app has detection capabilities for pirated instances, and reports the UUID of the device back to his server. After 10 days of running a cracked version, users are presented with a "trial over" dialog box and given the option to buy up to the legitimate version."

This takes a different approach than the one Ripdev takes, and certainly doesn't cost the software programmer as much either. The Full Screen Web Browser author gives people using the cracked aka pirated version 10 days to try the program before they get this screen requiring them to either quit or buy the program. And before any of you legitimate purchasers of the program start worrying, Ben says that he has programmed the new feature to only ping back from pirated versions of his software.