macOS How to protect to show the package contents of my app?

No and no.

What do you need to hide? Might just binary encode the resource (maybe with some hashing etc) or bundle it into the main binary?

Learner said:

Hi all,

i want to protect to show the package contents.

is there any method to this.

of if its is not possible ,can i make is password protected.

please help me for this.

thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

I can show the package contents of the Finder. Of iTunes. Of Microsoft Word. Of Adobe Reader. Of Xcode. Even of MacDefender. Why on earth would you want to hide the package contents of your app? Do you think anyone cares? Don't you have more important things to do, like making it actually work?

Learner it's really no different then going to C:\program files\PROGRAM_NAME\

and viewing all that jazz. Also opening and editing .dll files.

The basic user doesn't do **** to that. The above basic might edit some files to change the UI or rename some things inside. Advance might be able to hack it.


*If PSN can't stop intruders don't think you can either.

Learner said:

Hi all,

i want to protect to show the package contents.

is there any method to this.

of if its is not possible ,can i make is password protected.

please help me for this.

thanks in advance.

Click to expand...

From the view of the OS your .app file is a directory like any other (fun exercise: try making a directory and then rename it to test.app). So protecting it would require giving the OS access to this directory without giving the user access -- impossible.

If there is something in there that you don't want users accessing you're going to have to use a very robust security scheme. And even then it will probably be cracked anyway, and just to embarrass you for even trying to protect your app they'll probably try to crack it in less than an hour. (if a company like Adobe cannot manage to protect their assets, do you think you can? of course not).

Not to sound meanhearted, but I've released software in the past and know that it's useless to try to do this sort of thing. Back in 2003 I released a game, and even though I was using what I thought was a clever scheme to validate serial numbers pirates reverse engineered it and used it to spit out every single valid serial number in a matter of a day. If someone wants to break your software bad enough they simply will.