14 DAY TRIAL // Sites selling UDID activation codes are getting shut down at the hand of Apple Inc., the company whose developer programs allow programmers to install and test pre-release software on 100 devices per account.
Andy Baio said in a feature piece on Wired, “For a small developer, unauthorized activations are a lucrative business that’s likely worth the risks.”
“UDID Activation publishes their order queue on their official site, which shows more than 2,300 devices activated in the last week alone. At $8.99 for each activation, that’s more than $20,600 in revenue, with $2,277 paid to Apple for the 23 developer accounts,” he explained.
However, not long after the story hit the wires, sites like activatemyios.com, iosudidregistrations.com, activatemyudid.com, udidregistration.com, and instantudidactivation.com no longer offered their services.
MacStories contacted some of them with questions regarding the shutdown, whether it was because of Apple, etc.
Not many companies answered back, but the few that did revealed that their hosting providers initiated the outage “after complaint for copyright infringement by Apple.”
The chief executive officer of Fused, a third-party developer, told Baio in a tweet that Apple had been “fairly heavy-handed” with DMCA requests to sites selling UDID activation codes.
The site owner said they made $75,000 since the original iOS 6 beta rolled out last month.
“We do not believe our service was infringing and our services did not violate their guidelines for iOS 6&Prime,” the site owner said. He said he and his team had plans to launch a new site “with better and more secure data lines to handle Apple.”
One of the most popular UDID-selling sites, udidactivation.com, is still online, though its services seem to be unavailable. Apple is also cracking down on sites selling access to OS X betas.
The Mac maker runs a program called AppleSeed where select customers may be granted access to pre-release software, free of charge.