Crackulous is released, chaos imminent

iPhone developers who already have to fight for app approval, exposure and marketing techniques now have a new hurdle to overcome: instantaneous app-cracking. Although cracking iPhone applications for use on a jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch is not new, the method has never been so easy or so accessible.

Crackulous, an application developed on the Hackulous forums (Hackulous is a community dedicated to cracking iPhone apps; back in my day we called these warez boards), makes it possible to "crack" any purchased App Store application. That app can then be transferred for use on other devices.

Although the larger discussion of intellectual property, DRM, peer-to-peer transfers and what constitutes "piracy" is filled with large gray areas, Crackulous strikes me as about as black and white as you can get. Any way you slice it, this is piracy. This isn't about fighting DRM or fighting what some see as a draconian application platform, this is theft.

While pirated applications are hardly a new phenomenon, we still have relatively unsullied ground in the world of mobile applications. The Symbian platform appears to have a warez community, but BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android (though Android is currently not selling any pay apps at this time) are relatively piracy free.

What makes App Store piracy different from other types of software piracy (mobile or otherwise) is that developers don't have the opportunity to strengthen or change the protection scheme that ties an application to a user account. Because all applications must go through Apple in order to reach the App Store (which is equally controlled by Apple), developers can't fight back, they can only wait for Apple to try to strengthen the protection scheme or introduce other counter-piracy measures.

What are developers supposed to do, other than lobby Apple to make changes to make this sort of decryption more complex? Because devices must be jailbroken in order to run cracked applications, an obvious answer could be for Apple to try to make devices more difficult to jailbreak.

To be clear, jailbreaking does not equal piracy, but to deny that there are many users who jailbreak for the sole purpose of running cracked applications is just naive. By taking potential sales away from the App Store, Crackulous takes potential money away from Apple. Apple will respond. How successful the cat and mouse game will ultimately be, only time will tell, but Apple will respond.

The defenders of applications like Crackulous say that if Apple offered a trial period on apps, this wouldn't be necessary. Perhaps. But I think it is far more likely that developments like this will only make trial periods less and less likely.

Think about it: Right now the only way to crack an application is to buy it. What happens when you can download apps for a "trial" without paying anything? Not even the initial purchase has to be made before the application is cracked and ready to be downloaded by the masses.

I agree that Apple needs to develop a better way for users to either try apps, or conversely, have the ability to request a refund for apps that don't work as promised, but cracking the apps hardly seems to be the solution. All applications like Crackulous really seem to do is undermine the legitimate uses for jailbreaking that may exist, and encourage Apple to make its process more closed, rather than more open.

[Editor's Note: This is a thorny issue on a lot of levels and we know reader response will be passionate in both directions. While we're open to discussing the issue of piracy, ethics and jailbreaking in the comments, please know that any comments containing torrent links to warez or direct downloads for cracked apps will be removed. Repeated infractions will force us to block the offending users and/or close comments to the post.]

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Analysis / Opinion iPhone App Store Jailbreak/pwnage

iPhone developers who already have to fight for app approval, exposure and marketing techniques now have a new hurdle to overcome:...

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Darkwing Duck

Sorry you feel that way, Gazoobee... but the Dev-Team is strongly against cracked apps. My phone is jailbroken, and it's for themes, copy/paste functions, a brighter flashlight, and any other cool utilities I find in Cydia.

Don't make generalizations. I go through the AppStore at least 8 times a week, and everytime I do, it's more disappointing than the last. If Yo Mama jokes and iFart apps are the best apple has to offer for customization, then I have no regrets whatsoever.

February 23 2009 at 4:23 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Tariq

Come on, apps for the iPhone are cheap as it is, and the ones that people charge $5+ for are usually worth the money. Support developers on the iPhone platform so that we can continue to use and get more of these amazing apps.

February 11 2009 at 7:15 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Petar Smilajkov

Developers have to get their apps tested on http://iBetaTest.com - the largest iPhone beta tester's community :)

February 06 2009 at 11:34 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Miguel GonÃ§alves

If Apple released the App Store when the first gen of iphone was on the market maybee the cult of jailbreaking an iphone was not so popular has it is!
Developers started to build applications and installing them trough cydia.
And the only way to reach cydia was jailbreaking the iPhone.

If Apple offers some tools to build themes and other personalization stuff maybee 50% of the people wont jailbreak the iPhone

If Apple allowed VOIP over 3G/EDGE maybee we didn't need to jailbreak the iPhone to install a small patch to allow voip calls trouh fring...

This last feature is for me one of the most important!
I'm from Portugal and here, you pay for every comunication, there is no such thing has free calls.
Trough fring with an sip connection using voipbuster i can make calls to all the parts of the world for free* (just paying 10$ for a 3 months free period)

There is much more reasons to jailbreak an iPhone than just for installing cracked apps.

February 03 2009 at 9:35 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Cameron

crackulous isn't the problem, it simply lets them crack there own apps. I guess then they can give them to people, but the people they give them to would have to also have a jailbroken iPhone, the bigger problem I think is Installous and I don't understand why it's been out for a while and nobody is getting upset until crackulous came out. Installous is more dangerous because thats what lets you download cracked apps. Like my iPhone is jailbroken and I don't want apple to completely stop jailbreaking because of this. I mean just because someone's iPhone is jailbroken, doesn't mean that they are using hackulous apps. Punish them not the jailbroken iPhones

February 03 2009 at 8:21 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

glad

I thought I had seen it all but to crack a $0.99 app is probably as low as you can possibly go in the computer world. There are some real cheap bums out there may their iPhone implode.

February 03 2009 at 3:57 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Ken Cavanaugh

I have jailbroken my iPod touch. Not because I want to install cracked apps but I enjoy some of the functionality that you can only get through jailbreaking (e.g. folders, copy & paste, app launchers).

I own a photography business and I feel very strongly about the copyrights on my work. If I were to install cracked apps I would be a hypocrite. Besides, most of the apps on iTunes are an incredible bargain when compared to other mobile platforms.

Unfortunately I think that this app will encourage more people to jailbreak their iPhones and iPod touches but let's hope not.

February 03 2009 at 12:11 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

Traci Collins

I am opposed to cracking apps and I do buy several every month. That said, I am very concerned that the author and many of the posters think that preventing jail breaking is a solution to the cracking problem. As long as Apple refuses to permit background processes in official apps jailbreaking is essential. Background processes are absolutely necessary for location sensitive applications to be useful and there is an entire world of iPhone enhancers that can't be successfully implimented without background processes. Apple's restrictions limit the utility and therefore the value of appstore apps. The crippled nature of voice dialers and other potentially useful apps does much more to limit developers success than cracking. It seems like Apple has decided that ATT is it's customer instead of the iPhone purchasers.

traci

February 03 2009 at 11:45 AM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

2 replies to Traci Collins's comment

Christina Warren

I don't think preventing jailbreaking is the solution to the problem, I just think that's the logical place this is going to go. It makes much more sense to address the actual encryption process and to allow developers additional abilities to protect their apps, but I think it will be far more likely to make the devices harder to exploit than to do all that work.

I agree that the net result is "punishing" legitimate users who jailbreak their devices with no intention of cracking or installing cracked apps, and that's a potential nasty side effect of stuff like this.

Of course, the best compromise would be for Apple to open up parts of the SDK to allow for backgrounding, enhanced dialers and other useful tools and utilities that are currently jailbreak only, and then work at making the firmware harder to exploit -- but I'm skeptical that sort of thing will happen.

February 03 2009 at 12:03 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

vandil

Don't forget that an iPhone has only 128MB of runtime memory. And at any given point, all the hidden processes that run to make your iPhone work nice consume a good portion of that runtime memory.

(Ironically, you can purchase "FreeMemory" from the App store for $0.99 to see these processes and have a UI to kill some of them.)

There's a carefully tweaked balance to that ecosystem.

Jailbroken phones don't have to play nicely and can allow you to do things that can cause your phone to crash or operate outside the "experience" you are supposed to be having with the device. (This includes jailbreak apps that kill essential processes or use the phone's hardware in ways it was not designed for, possibly taxing the hardware.)

Basically, once you jailbreak your phone (for whatever reason you did it), you have only yourself to blame if the phone has partial/total failure early in its life, fails to work properly, experiences battery issues, or anything else that is the result of running the phone out of spec.

A bunch of NES games and recording video with the crappy camera just aren't worth the hassle. And using the phone as an Internet tether for a laptop doesn't make you look cool. Quite the opposite.

February 03 2009 at 1:02 PM Report abuse Permalink rate up rate down Reply

vandil

Software piracy was rampant in the pre-Internet era, in fact that's how Windows became so popular.

But once the Internet came into being, if someone has a pseudo-anonymous way of stealing software/media for free, they might steal it.

Typically this is done by teens and tweens who feel it is okay to steal because:
1. They have no income (or barely enough income left over after bills).
2. They weren't going to buy the product anyway because it's priced above their means (e.g. Adobe Creative Suite).
3. They don't want to feel the coffers of the evil parent company.
4. They just want to use the program to do one quick thing and then uninstall it. So why buy it? (same goes with a media file).
5. The retail version contains DRM that can cause the legitimate customer to not be able to use the product if something flags as a false-positive to the DRM (software timebombs, hardware change, authentication server goes offline 10 years later).

This problem won't go away any time soon, especially if the legitimate retail version has DRM that can prevent a legitimate user from using the product years from now.

So I say, make your Apps as usual, price them as you see fit, and people will still buy it. Accept that plenty of people won't. The App store is not a get rich quick scheme nor it is meant to be a hobbyist/upcoming/startup launch platform.