Do I have to support jailbroken iPhones?

Question

We're days away from submitting our first app to the appstore and last night I was horrified to hear that it does not work on jailbroken devices. I got a few seconds with the device and saw the OS version, and free memory available (36MB, I guess that's low).

Should I care?

Presumably jailbreak users can buy the app and write scathing reviews. If so and jailbroken iPhones are common, then the iPhoneJB becomes a de facto shadow-platform that I'm obliged to support.

EDIT

I got some ball park figures, sounds like I should care about the new de facto shadow platform. So either I can try reducing memory requirements and cross my fingers, or get out the credit card and go get me another iPhone to jailbreak.

@Isaac, no, if Apple liked me they'd filter jailbreak users' reviews from the AppStore. — Rhythmic Fistman, Aug 01 '09 at 06:00
So the conclusion here is that jailbroken phones have less memory available? What are we supposed to draw from this? — Oscar, Jul 12 '11 at 20:19
This is absolutely **programming related** for the technical reasons I outline [in my answer below](http://stackoverflow.com/a/14668922/119114). If you only consider the business side of this question, you're *doing it wrong*. — Nate, Feb 05 '15 at 22:55

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 01 '09 at 05:45

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With around 2.3 million jailbroken iPhones, it is a significant portion of the market. I have a jailbroken iPhone, but most of my apps are from the App Store. I vote yes.

answered Aug 01 '09 at 05:45

Jamison Dance

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score 9 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:27

This is a similar issue to what many web developers run into: should they support Internet Explorer 6? While as of this writing 14.9% of the market still uses IE6, many web developers choose not to support it because it is difficult and takes too much time. My own experience was that supporting IE6 caused 50% of my work; that's obviously not a good trade-off.

As Jergason mentioned, there are 2.3 million jailbroken iPhones. Obviously that's a large market. But compare that with the 30 million iPhones total sold as of March 2009. You could probably find better numbers to compare, but assuming those numbers are roughly accurate, less than 10% of the market is jailbroken. Look at how much work, money, etc. it's going to take to support jailbroken phones. I don't know how much work it would take, but when it comes to money, my guess is that simply the cost of getting a jailbroken iPhone to test on will be more than 10% of your revenue (iPhone dev tends to be a small-scale operation, but I don't know the nature of your product so I could be way off-base here).

So my vote is neither yes nor no: do the research and get more detailed stats than I've provided here. When you have your information, don't spend a larger percentage of your revenue supporting a segment of the market than that segment is as a percentage of the whole.

We're a small shop, but we've been working for 5 months, so no, a 2nd hand iPhone shouldn't be more than 10% of our costs. Thanks. — Rhythmic Fistman, Aug 02 '09 at 07:03
10% of revenue, not 10% of cost. But you also need to factor in good will, word of mouth, etc. — Craig McQueen, Aug 17 '09 at 11:49

score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 17 '09 at 11:45

Of course you don't have to support anyone you don't want to! Ultimately, as others have noted, it's a business decision.

In my experience, you'll spend a disproportionate amount of time supporting users with jailbroken handsets. I spent more than twenty hours tracking down one problem that only affected jailbroken phones and even then only found the solution entirely by accident.

Having said that, some of my most enthusiastic (or at least vocal!) users have jailbroken handsets.

At the time of writing, about 25% of users of my free version have a jailbroken handset and 10% for the paid version.

In the end I try to support all users but I do put a higher priority on users with vanilla handsets. I'd draw the line at users of cracked versions, but I have no reason to suspect that's the case.

Incidenally, technically you'd be in breach of your iPhone Developer Program agreement if you used a jailbroken handset. And 36Mb sounds like a lot of available memory for anything other than a 3GS.

Thanks for the considered answer. Developers can't even "use" a JB handset? What's the clause no.? What constitutes use? Can we touch one? What if we didn't know it was JB-ed at the time? Anyway, technically we shouldn't have to support non-standard handsets, but the reality is different. — Rhythmic Fistman, Aug 17 '09 at 12:58
I can't find a publicly available link to the agreement, but the story is here: http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/04/latest-iphone-developer-agreement-bans-jailbreaks.ars — Stephen Darlington, Aug 17 '09 at 19:29

score 3 · Answer 4 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:18

The accepted answer to this question seems fine, but I thought I'd add one more (technical) issue to consider.

If you don't at least test your app on jailbroken devices, you may not be aware of some security vulnerabilities. If your app contains any kind of sensitive information, you might want to make sure it can't be easily accessed on a jailbroken device. This might include protecting users' data, or protecting the corporate data on the back end.

Jailbroken phones allow a user to ssh into the phone, and browse any file on the filesystem. The sandbox is nullified (App Store apps will still be limited to their own sandboxes, but non App Store apps will be able to read and write the sandboxes of other apps, including App Store apps).

NSUserDefaults used to store sensitive information, for example, are easily exploited on a jailbroken device.

Even the keychain can be subverted on jailbroken phones.

It would be nice if you didn't have to worry about this, but at least through iOS 6, you really do need to worry about it. So far, Apple has not been able to (or maybe doesn't want to) completely prevent jailbreaking, so it's a real-world vulnerability. Ignoring it is probably not doing your clients or users any favors.

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Aug 01 '09 at 05:42

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Do your market research. Do you expect to sell to alot of users with jail broken iPhones? Then you need to decide how important that revenue is to you...

answered Aug 01 '09 at 05:42

Mitch Wheat

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And exactly what demographic uses jailbroken iPhones? Hardened criminals and developers, I guess. Would they be interested in a music-entertainment category app? – Rhythmic Fistman Aug 01 '09 at 05:55
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Seriously, I'm more worried about the app store comments. A disgruntled jailbreak user can convince non-jailbreak users to not buy. Not sure how a market researcher would model that problem. – Rhythmic Fistman Aug 01 '09 at 05:58
@Rhythmic Fistman: like I said, only you can decide whether it makes financial sense to YOU. – Mitch Wheat Aug 01 '09 at 06:10
This is *far* from your only concern. If jailbreaking the phone allows users (or other software) to steal or manipulate your app's sensitive data (user data, or from the back end), or otherwise game the system, then you need to care, even if you don't **plan** to get many jailbroken users. – Nate Mar 09 '13 at 22:01

Do I have to support jailbroken iPhones?

5 Answers5