Apps My paid app is being distributed for free :(

[Ethan Allwood]

So I published a game to the Google Play store a few weeks ago, for $0.99 and I looked online and even though my app only has 1 download I found 3 different sites distributing the .apk for free. Is there any way to stop this?

 

[scary alien]

Yeah, bunch of scumbag sites that copy and re-post apps .

Have a peek at this excellent thread over on stackoverflow.com:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9865162/how-to-secure-my-app-against-piracy​

The second answer in that thread references this:

http://developer.android.com/guide/market/licensing/index.html​

which says, in part:

Google Play offers a licensing service that lets you enforce licensing policies for applications that you publish on Google Play. With Google Play Licensing, your application can query Google Play at run time to obtain the licensing status for the current user, then allow or disallow further use as appropriate.

Little bit of extra work I'm guessing (I haven't used this for my apps), but probably worth it in the long run.

Best of luck and let us know if you implement this and what your experiences were with it.

Cheers!