Early last month, just a few days before our intended release of paid applications on SlideME, someone raised the issue on the Android lists about whether our apps were protected from copying. I had naively assumed that Google protected the installed application space; and after a quick check found out that this was not the case. A Google engineer also confirmed this on the lists. You could pull off any installed app using the Android developer tools.

So we had to start working on SlideLock, a very simple protection scheme that developers embed into their apps, in principle similar to Mogees. This caused us a lot of grief, having to put our launch on hold, right after announcing our upcoming launch. And then we took some justifiable heat from Tim (the same one who reported the security hole in Google's app protection). We intended SlideLock for protection from only 95% of users, realizing certain holes in the solution.

We were waiting to see the protection scheme Google came up with for paid applications. We had hoped to try to plugin SAM, our application manager, into whatever APIs Google may have exposed for application protection. But in less than 12 hours, Google's protection scheme was hacked, in the simplest of ways.

So I think we will be sticking with SlideLock and also adding better support for users who would like to use Mogees' solution for applications on SlideME. For now, this looks like the best approach.