So this is something I see once in a while and it really annoys me. Some free apps, and I don't wanna bring up names just to stay sure of not causing any problems with forum rules or maybe having devs add more protection, have protection against sideloading. Why??? It's useless when an app is completely free, no IAPs and no ads at all, nothing that anyone would pirate. This is extremely annoying, especially when I have secondary devices that I do not wanna log into with any of my Google accounts. I used to just bang my head on the desk for around 5 years over this, but now that I know how to reverse engineer dex bytecode files I can break this stupid protection that protects literally nothing at all. Just destroyed the anti-sideload protection on the original app that first showed me this stupidity was a thing 5 years ago, all by correcting the boolean from the app store install checker to always return a 4-bit 0x1 (0001 in binary) that represents "true". Like I can understand DRM in something with ad support, IAPs, etc... to protect from piracy, but this is just dumb and takes as little as under a minute to defeat like I did now. This garbage is even easier to break than the build expiry date stuff on some early Android abandonware.
Edit: I'd go into further detail on how these systems and such typically work, but since defeating them can sometimes allow for sidestepping other DRM measures, I don't wanna post anything here that could be considered a piracy tutorial or anything illegal like that.
Edit: I'd go into further detail on how these systems and such typically work, but since defeating them can sometimes allow for sidestepping other DRM measures, I don't wanna post anything here that could be considered a piracy tutorial or anything illegal like that.