Google Android Clamps Down On Unauthorised App Use

In a sign of Google’s growing commitment to the Android development community, Google said 27 July that it has created a free licensing service to protect paid applications in the Android Market from unauthorised use.

The move will prevent tech-savvy users from downloading for-free applications on the Android Market, which has some 70,000 free and paid programs. The service includes a set of libraries developers can use to query the Android Market licensing server to check up on licensing status of users.

Authorised Access

The program retrieves information on whether users are authorised to access the app based on stored sales records, said Eric Chu, a member of Google’s Android Developer Ecosystem, in a blog post.

“This licensing service operating real time over the network provides more flexibility in choosing licence-enforcement strategies, and a more secure approach in protecting your applications from unauthorised use, than copy protection,” Chu explained.

Google plans to replace the current Android Market copy protection tool with the new licensing service, which will manage access to all paid Market apps for Android 1.5 or higher, over the next few months.

Google has taken a lot of heat over the last few months for Android Market.

Too Open

While the store has attracted thousands of developers who prefer the open source approach over the more strongnet App Store from Apple, the open and freewheeling ethos has sacrificed some quality.

For example, DoubleTwist’s Jon Lech Johansen said the Market suffered from insufficient billing and too much spam.

Google also attracted attention when it used the Market’s remote application removal feature to remove two potentially malicious applications from Android devices.

On the company’s second quarter earnings call 15 July, Google Senior Vice President of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg promised several changes were in motion to boost the e-commerce capabilities and overall user experience for developers and consumers of the Android Market.

Google signalled one such change 22 July, when it said that it is preparing to allow consumers to purchase applications from the Android Market and charge them to their wireless phone bills.