Question

the license agreement for the Mac Developer Program explicitly states that I am not to implement my own copy protection process in my Mac app.

Yet, in the developer documentation, Apple also says this:

You can add receipt validation code to
your application to prevent
unauthorized copies of your
application from running.

I am confused here. Does the Mac App Store provide any form of built-in copy protection for Mac apps? The above statement from Apple would seem to indicate that it does not.

The statement suggests that if I do not implement these receipt checks, then unauthorised copies of my Mac App CAN run on other Macs.

I’m not allowed to implement (or rather, keep an existing) copy protection, but I am expected to verify receipts manually, using various fragments of code and pseudo-code provided by Apple, simply to provide the most basic level of protection. Is this interpretation correct?

Is this a miscommunication from Apple, or is this really how things are done?

Ref: http://developer.apple.com/devcenter/mac/documents/validating.html

Thanks.

(Please note that I’m not after a debate on the philosophy of copy-protection or the merits of Apple’s approach. Rather, I’m just interested in the technical requirements for getting a Mac app on to the App Store.)

Answer 1

Yes, you are correct. It’s their way or the highway.