For developers it’s frustrating to see months of sleepless hard work cracked in a simple step with applications like crackulous. Crackulous is an application used for cracking any paid iPhone application for free distribution among jailbroken iPhone users.

Here is a new way to fight iPhone application piracy with your own application. Ben Chatelain, the developer of Full Screen Browser found a way to track down illegitimate users of his application. The latest version of his app has the capability to detect pirated copies and reports the UDID of the devices on which cracked apps are installed to his server. Other developers can as well adopt this strategy.

The process does not end here. After 10 days, users of the cracked app are alerted that they are running a trial version of the application and are prompted to purchase the legitimate version. If the pirates are adamant to pay up for the application it would simply refuse to launch after the 10 days grace period. 

We will see many developers adopting this method of fighting piracy in coming days and crackers trying to figure out workarounds. This also is an interesting mouse and cat game, the play continues. 

People jailbreak their devices mainly for getting features that are not available on the un-jailbroken iPhone, it’s not known how many jailbreak their devices for the sole cause of getting applications free. Probably the number is to few to be counted at all.