Smart Electron Applications Licensing with .NET can provide a solution

The Electron Software Framework, originally released in 2013, has successfully carved out a significant share of the Desktop Application Market. Electron is a unique, open-source, cross-platform framework for creating desktop applications on Mac, Windows, and Linux using web technologies such as JavaScript/Nodejs, HTML, and CSS. The framework comes with automatic updates, native menus, and notifications as well as crash reporting, debugging, and profiling. Companies such as Microsoft (VSCode, Skype, GitHub For Windows), Slack, WhatsApp, and Basecamp deliver Electron-based desktop applications.

Protecting Electron Applications against reverse engineering.

If you are developing using the Electron Framework, your application may contain sensitive IP (e.g. proprietary algorithms) that you wish to protect against disclosure. It is difficult to protect against reverse engineering in any environment but is particularly difficult if you are using Javascript. One option is to extract the sensitive code to an external “native” module that is then called from Javascript and can be more easily protected against reverse engineering.

Protection against unauthorized use and Flexibly Packaging your Application for sale.

At a minimum, you will want to securely implement simple license checks in your application to prevent unauthorized use of your application. To maximize revenue, you may wish to offer different editions of your application. This can be easily done using features in licenses to enable/disable specific features in your application. Similarly, you may plan to move to a recurring revenue stream and offer subscription licenses alongside traditional perpetual licenses. To encourage sales, you may want to offer managed trials where prospects can quickly and easily avail of time-limited trials of your application. This flexibility can only be achieved with a Smart Licensing solution.

Licensing Challenges for Electron Applications

As with code protection is it difficult to securely implement license checks in Javascript but you can mitigate against this if you avoid making simple insecure binary license calls in Javascript and instead move some significant portions of the business logic into external addon modules and implement the licensing checks there along with any required code protection.

These add-on modules could be native C/C++ modules that are compiled for each target platform but this requires an integrated toolchain that can compile for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Alternatively, you could migrate the code to a portable C# .NET assembly that can target Mac, Windows, and Linux using the .NET cross-platform tooling integrated with the Electron build environment. You can then automatically apply for code protection and licensing techniques to these modules as part of the build process. You can also take advantage of the Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code IDEs, and associated build tooling to simplify multiplatform targeting.

Smart Licensing for Electron Applications

The Software Potential Smart Licensing Solution from Inishtech is a perfect solution for Electron Application developers looking to address these issues. Software Potential is a Cloud-Based service that supports multiple flexible application licensing models including Managed Trials, Subscriptions, and Feature Management.

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