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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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.