Yes, the Market “DRM” Really Is That Bad

Posted on February 20th, 2009 in Android Hacking, Android News by Disconnect  Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

As reported elsewhere, the so-called DRM on the Android Market is worthless. We found this out a few hours ago, but I was holding off on posting pending further investigation and talking to Google. Now that its already out.. yes, everything he says is true. The so-called DRM barely qualifies as “permissions”, and sucks down a ton of space that the G1 really can’t spare.

If you want to back up your own apps (or save some of that space!) what you want to do is:

  1. Be root. (OK yeah, so ADP1 owners are gonna get a bunch of bad press. On top of all their other problems, now they are automatically assumed to be thieves. Assuming they ever get that promised update that is..)
  2. Purchase an app. Yep, sorry, gotta start here.
  3. [code]adb pull /data/app-private/{fooo.apk} .[/code]
  4. [code]adb uninstall {foo}[/code]
  5. [code]adb install {foo.apk}[/code]
  6. Now the apk is backed up to the current directory, AND you’re recovered all that extra space by installing it as normal to /data/app.




5 Responses to 'Yes, the Market “DRM” Really Is That Bad'

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  1.    Unk said,

    on February 20th, 2009 at 6:35 pm

    What you all fail to mention, is that you can still claim a refund for the application after “cracking” it!

    Reply

  2.    otto888 said,

    on February 21st, 2009 at 6:33 pm

    Can’t this be done with terminal emulator? just use cp to copy it to sd card,and then uninstall(and refund :P )?

    Reply

  3.    Luis said,

    on February 22nd, 2009 at 6:48 pm

    What about those of us that have the ext2 partition? /system/sd isn’t the same as the /data/data. I tried these commands but no go. I have no problem paying for apps, as I do it on my ipod, but I do have a problem paying twice!

    Reply

  4.    DarkriftX said,

    on February 25th, 2009 at 1:08 pm

    They keep track of what apps you have paid for and you can redownload them at any time. Given it probably will fail right now with the current market bugs not letting you download updates but I think that only happens if the version is newer.

    Reply

  5.    Paul said,

    on March 5th, 2009 at 10:25 am

    Does anyone know what problems I would experience if i installed the German update on my UK G1?

    Why would I do this? Because i understand the German version has access to paid apps in the market, the UK version doesnt. – Is that right?

    Thanks

    Reply

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