Local developer fights piracy by thinking different

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade -- that’s the philosophy of local iPhone developer Michael Tan. When he discovered that his countdown app, Upcoming Events, had been cracked, he decided to turn it into an opportunity. Instead of treating the users of the cracked version as crooks, he decided it would be more helpful to treat them as users of time-limited trial software.

If you use the latest cracked version of Upcoming Events (version 4.0) often enough, you will get a note telling you that the trial version of the software is expiring soon. Continue using it and the app will not display your data. The data is still there, but you will not be able to see it. 

To access this data again, users have to buy and install a legitimate copy of Upcoming Events on their device. “As long as the cracked version has not been deleted from the iPhone, the legitimate version will be able to access the old data,” says Michael. 

Michael’s approach is a clever way to get around Apple’s App Store policy of not allowing trial software. Legitimate users pay for a fully functioning app while users of cracked versions get to use the app for free, but for a limited time only. If people like it and find it useful, they would be happy to buy the legitimate version, which is being sold at an affordable US$5.99 (currently on sale for US$4.99).

Upcoming Events is like a contacts database which stores dates like birthdays and anniversaries. When you start it up, it will tell you how many more days to the events in your database. The latest version of the app allows you to add a photo to the contact, making it much easier to use.