Mobile App User Licensing with Little or No Backend Server

Abstract

For decades software licensing has been relaying on copyright registration and the declaration of this copyright at the software to be accepted and downloaded by the users. In this case the software developer need to work closely with legal departments and rely on the copyright laws where such laws enforcement vary from one country to other. The complexity of enforcing this licensing model largely come from the robust way of formulating the end-user license agreement (EULA) and the existence of a backend server that can monitor the usage of the software. Obviously the enforcement of this model may prove to be legally impossible as there will be many users who do not care about the software license as well as there will be an associated expenses with using the backend server. In this paper, a new method and a prototype for licensing mobile application that are uploaded on public cloud. In this method the users of the mobile app starts by using a declarative form of the License but they need to provide user specific data including the mobile unique device id, operating system and brand. The method also includes activating the application on the computing device using the device specific information. This licensing model protects software piracy and license vulnerability issues. The developed prototype for this type of licensing model has been applied for android applications as there are tons of Android apps on application stores at different domains. Experimental results show the process of integrating the licensing library with any android applications is easy without changing the existing application code and avoiding lengthy development efforts to secure mobile apps with fully licensed app and no legal overhead.