Android Takes A New Approach To Fighting Piracy With Licensing Service

Pirates looking to illegally copy Android applications are about to face a new challenge: today, Google's Android team announced that it is releasing a new application Licensing Service for Android. The service, which is meant to help developers secure their applications from piracy, forces apps to ping Google's home server at regular intervals to verify that they were legitimately purchased. Fail that check, and the app can lock you out. According to the Dev Guide , developers are free to decide how they want to deal with an application that is deemed to be pirated (a developer could disable the app entirely, or perhaps they could activate a trial mode prompting the user to purchase the real thing).