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Once published, Android applications—and their developers—face numerous threats to success in the real world. One Android developer advocate at Google recently referred to these pesky perpetrators as pirates (outright thieves) and vampires (those hangers-on sucking the life out of your product). A paid application might be stolen, illegally copied, and made available for download in alternative locations. A free application might be exploited, causing damage to a brand and leveraging valuable product resources like server bandwidth. All apps are vulnerable to hacking, resulting in rogue downloads with embedded malware, or using knowledge learned to hack a server or other underlying service. Unfortunately, this malicious behavior happens all the time. Protecting your applications is an ongoing battle, one that cannot ever truly be “won” because the opposition is constantly improving its nefarious methods of attack. You’ll never have a truly invulnerable app, but you can make your app a hard target. The good news is that, as Android developers, you have numerous ways to help protect your Android applications from exploitation. Today you will learn how to: Obfuscate your binary code using ProGuard Use the License Verification Library to verify Android Market purchased applications Protect your network communications with SSL