Well paid applications have officially rolled out, or rather - reached my phone through the android market. The first thing I wanted to find out, is what is the protection scheme used?! My first assumption is that it might be something tied to your account, or android id - something sort of like SlideLOCK which I previously mentioned. So after looking around the market I downloaded a few applications and I also decided to download some “protected” free applications. Mainly I wanted free applications to toy with, so I didn’t feel bad possibly violating paid ones :)

The programs I’ve started with where Inaugural Address 2009 and Phandroid News. Both are “protected” applications. What does this mean exactly? After a little digging it was clear exactly what “protected” actually meant;

So first I checked as you can tell, the SD card. Originally I was checking posts at xda-devs and someone posted that they where located on the SD card and where .zip files. This is false, the packages are .apk and located in the /data/app-private folder as you can see from the screen shot above. Well, what does this mean exactly? This means a non protected app, which is stored in /data/app can be pulled usingadb, while a protected app is located in /data/app-private is not allowed to be pulled by adb.

Though… with a rooted phone - this isn’t exactly a problem since it can pull any file!

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