The far side of mobile application integrated development environments

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. Smart phones are, nowadays, a necessity for the vast majority of individuals around the globe. In addition to the ubiquitous computing paradigm supported by such devices, there are numerous software applications that utilize the high computational capabilities that they offer. This type of software is a vital part of what is known as e-Commerce, with a variety of business models proposed and implemented. Lately, a new era of free-ware mobile application has arisen with paid features and promoted content in them. Piracy is not only the weakest point of software’s financial ecosystem for conventional computing systems but also for smartphones. Actions like replication, redistribution and licensing violations can cause financial losses of colossal extent to their creators. Mobile applications also introduce the following peculiarity: They are distributed through predefined channels (Application Stores) owned by mobile operating system vendors such as Apple, Google and Microsoft. In this research we present several scenarios where cracked and modified applications can be freely used into every non jailbroken iOS device. Moreover it is demonstrated that not even in strict mobile environments, such as Apple’s, end-users should be considered as trusted entities from application developers by default.