What if you could license-key and free-trial your themes?

[phone9]

(details of idea withdrawn due to lack of interest)

[Pete6]

An excellent idea. It would need to be fairly cheap since the cost of the tool would always be passed on to customers.

A 7 day Theme trial would be a great way to test a theme that looks good.

The big down side is that many people would simply live off of trial themes forever. Just get a new trial each week and drop back to a freebie or default if the trial expires or nothing catches your imagination.

Because of the above, there would be a need to restrict each theme to one trial per phone.

The best place for this tool to reside would be in JDK Theme Studio. However the chances of RIM doing anything like this must be extremely slim.

[Pete6]

I'm not knocking your idea. I like it a lot.

I just know what some users are like .

My guess is that a 3 day trial might now be more reasonable. It takes me a couple of days to fully get used to a new theme and its features.

Can you really do this? It would be great if you could.

[Pete6]

ANYTHING can be hacked if you try long enough and hard enough.

For a $5 theme, who the heck is gonna bother?

Provided you make the algorithm so that it is changable with a new software release, there's not going to be a serious problem with cracking I feel.

You app has got to be reasonably priced since the theme developer has go to get his/her money back within about 50 sales.

Can you make it so that it offers a pay by PayPal option? This will cut out a lot of red tape when paying.

I hope your app will come with a trial mode .

[BBThemes]

im sorry, i dont see the purpose in this, i can make a homescreen with a svg which includes either an image saying DEMO (or whatever) and then remove that image in the full version, without having to even remake the svg file, or (as iv seen some do) have the first icon repeated throughout the homescreen, rather than app order, again just rewriting a few lines of svg, very very little effort for a trial version.

what id far rather see a dev do, and im sure if anyone ever managed they be an overnight millionare, is a way to keep your icon order in your device no matter what theme you have. thats what we NEED, agreed other things we may want, but that would be awesome

[hastings]

Sounds very complicated.

I'm willing to bet 99% of theme developers don't even know what a JDE is, nor how to set it up. This alone will be a huge issue.

Further, theme prices are falling very, very quickly. $0.99 - $2.99 seems to be the sweet spot now, so I can't see any developer wanting to pay for this unless they were charging $5-7 for a theme. (Elecite, etc)

I think the best policy is to just allow users to try the theme out, and if they don't like it, give them a refund. Piracy will be an issue with or without this software, and frankly, it hasn't been a major issue yet.

Finally, if something ever went wrong with the licensing of themes, it will fall onto the developers technical support team HARD. I actually love that I don't have to worry about licensing and trials, it makes dealing with users who get new devices and want swaps much easier.

Just my two cents, I've got some really hot sellers and personally I wouldn't consider this for my products.

That being said, maybe somebody like Elecite or Hedone would? You should contact them!

Good luck. (=

[phone9]

Thank you. A few times I've heard theme devs complaining about not being able to key-protect themes, thinking they're losing a lot of money to piracy. That's why I was thinking of doing this, but if few if any theme devs would want it, of course I can't invest any more time in this. Glad I asked in advance.

What's interesting is the most of the successful app developers seem to think license enforcement is necessary, even for cheap apps, and even though it does cause a lot of support requests.