The refresh of Bakers Game Solitaire was released Monday evening. By the very next day, Chinese hackers tore into the code, hacked it, and posted it on their site. No - I'm not linking to it. It's easy enough to find, if you want to pay the hackers $1 for my app.
The pirates' web site is, at least, amusing:
• "You may only download this app for evaluation purposes" - because you certainly wouldn't want to evaluate the free and legal version
• They prominently display my name - free ads for me
• They provide a convenient link to my app on the Chinese iTunes App Store - more free ads!
• And, apparently, it's not only English where they have spelling problems - h4x0rs sux!
My app download numbers are up, too. Part of this may simply be the refresh and some chatter, but I think I also have to credit the pirates. I don't read and write Mandarin, so their conversion of my English into Chinese is most welcome. The pirates are building a buzz around my app that I would ordinarily have to pay decent coin for. Hey, this app is worth stealing! Even though it's free with zero distribution costs - it's still worth stealing! The hackers are even paying for disk and bandwidth! Whoo-hoo!
Now I'll freely admit I placed no anti-hacking / anti-piracy code in my app. So cracking Bakers Game is a task easily done by the greenest of code monkeys. But consider this - the time they wasted on my app is time they didn't spend cracking any other app. Without any anti-hacking code, there's nothing there for the hackers to learn from. It was nothing but a giant time suck.
At the end of the day I have more downloads, an amusing blog post, and I've delayed the pirates' hacking of other apps and content. God I love winning!
Keep coding!
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