Internet search giant Google has recently disabled a new security feature which it had introduced in its latest Android OS iteration – Android version 4.1 ‘Jelly Bean’ – to ensure that illicit copies of apps for the new OS could not be made easily.

The somewhat quiet and temporary deactivation of the Android app DRM - which Google had debuted last month - is chiefly an upshot of a bug which has supposedly hampered the operations of the secured versions of some apps.

The deactivated Android app DRM basically encrypts all the paid apps which users download from the Google Play store with a device-specific key. The encoding of the apps ensures that the apps run only on the device on which they were originally downloaded; even though it is still possible for the users to manually copy the apps to some other device with the help of backup software.

Google decided to deactivate the security feature after Google's Android bug database started receiving reports which revealed that some users were finding it difficult to launch apps on their Jelly Bean devices, although their copies were legitimate.

With the problem apparently stemming from some glitch in the Jelly Bean’s startup code – with a bug seemingly corrupting affected apps whenever the device is powered on rebooted by the users -, the re-downloaded apps are now being installed in the unencrypted portion of the memory of the Android device.