Jailbroken iPhone users getting locked out of the App Store

[Just_Me_D]

Look, your reputation is on the line for this.

Whose? Mine or Ghostface?

The app store contains millions of apps downloaded and used and shared by jailed and jailbroken users alike every second. That's how it is.

I'm in agreement with you

Jailbroken devices are mainstream.

That is debatable. To techie types like us, i agree that jailbreaking is mainstream, but if the percentage of JB devices are less than a percent or even 10% of the overall devices then it is not mainstream.

Whether or not my device is Jailbroken, I have the exact same number of apps download to my device.

Okay. No problem.

You don't respect jailbreaking. You don't see it as mainstream or normal, or even moral.

If you're referring to me then you are mistaken. I've made it perfectly clear that I don't have a problem with JBing and that the focus of my replies were on the developers right to configure their apps to not work on JB devices if they do chooses.

But here's the thing: The fact of the matter is that anything you download to your device can cause it to act up. YOUR app included.

I'm not a developer so I'm assuming this is targeted at someone else

So when you've gone through the trouble to make your app half available, half unavailable, (when it doesn't matter anyway, because we're jailbroken) and people tell you that your app is crashing (read the reviews for yourself) what does that tell you?

No comment-N/A

It tells you one thing. It doesn't matter. You don't want the money of a person with a Jailbroken device. You don't need the money of a person with a jailbroken device. You think you're better than that. What do you think you're trying to prove?

I disagree. See my earlier reply about "being a business decision".

Software is software, jailbreaking is not a virus. It's the same device.

No problem.




Just Me, D
(Tapatalk - iPhone 4S)

 

[Fausty82]

These types of developers must be mad as hell. I don't always jail break my devices, but I would at least like to have the option and choice.

You do have options and choices... same as the developers... sometimes those choices exclude other possibilities... if you only have $20 and spend it on pizza, you don't have any funds left to buy steak.

Life is all about compromise and choice, my friend.

 

[ModeratorOMD]

That it is. And, you're fine JustMe'D, it wasn't directed at you.

 

[Just_Me_D]

That it is. And, you're fine JustMe'D, it wasn't directed at you.

Whew! Okay, thanks.


Just Me, D
(Tapatalk - iPhone 4S)

 

[ModeratorOMD]

Whew! Okay, thanks.


Just Me, D
(Tapatalk - iPhone 4S)

One point that I did want to touch on with you before, because I was juggling some errands this afternoon.

You seem to have been in agreement with the person that said that because he blocked the app that it was doing us a favor. The thing is, we're just writing this one off, but by virtue, having unusable apps to a certain demographic is actually not doing us a favor. We're writing this one off because it's an app that no one really ... wants? These apps slipped under the radar, but had it been a must-have app, there would be a lot more debate.

So, I guess this is more of a on a case-by-case basis. My view of this person that does this is some kind of indie developer, I don't think big name developers would be able to get away with something like that. It's certainly not going to become standard.

 

[Just_Me_D]

One point that I did want to touch on with you before, because I was juggling some errands this afternoon.

You seem to have been in agreement with the person that said that because he blocked the app that it was doing us a favor. The thing is, we're just writing this one off, but by virtue, having unusable apps to a certain demographic is actually not doing us a favor. We're writing this one off because it's an app that no one really ... wants? These apps slipped under the radar, but had it been a must-have app, there would be a lot more debate.

So, I guess this is more of a on a case-by-case basis. My view of this person that does this is some kind of indie developer, I don't think big name developers would be able to get away with something like that. It's certainly not going to become standard.

I agree with the below statement in its entirety from Fausty82:

{...."He has made the decision to not support JB devices.
If he chooses to block HIS software from JB devices, he's saving his support staff the trouble of even dealing with what he considers to be non-issues.
If he chooses to block HIS software from JB devices, he is also saving you (and the rest of the JB user base) the headache of dealing with an app that seems to have an issue.
Seems to me like he's actually doing you a favor. And the issue seems pretty much cut and dried to me....}

Now, from the perspective of the developer making a business decision to not support JB devices because certain JB configurations have been linked to causing problems with his or her apps, the developer can be viewed as doing people a favor by not having them deal with those problems.


Just Me, D
(Tapatalk - iPhone 4S)

 

[Wiltron]

The Jailbreaking community will overcome this anti-jailbreaking development, because they fight for the little guy. The developers are really now just supporting the pirating community because they are the ones who will bypass the restrictions with hacks and cracks.

What everyone doesn't realize is that the only way to make a device 100% secure from every form of attack is simple: don't make it.

Case and point: The on-going development of iOS software. Apple tirelessly tries to patch their software, but the dev team works just as hard and finds holes in their security. Apple patches, dev-team unpatches/breaks through.

As someone said earlier in this thread, us Jailbreaker's are a small percentage of the total iOS users, even smaller of that percentage are the people who pirate app store apps. How much revenue are they ACTUALLY loosing to piracy? If 5% of Apple devices are Jailbroken, I'd say -maybe- 20% of those are for the sole purpose of piracy. Let's do some math here..

1.5 Billion apps - Assume half are "paid" programs
12 Million iOS devices - Assume 10% are jailbroken
1.2 Million jailbroken devices - Assume half pirate (gross over estimate)
600,000 piracy laden jailbroken devices. Are they REALLY going to pirate ALL 750,000 apps?

The movie industry said that piracy is killing them, yet The Avengers raked in 200+ million on it's first opening weekend, paying for the entire production and salaries of staff. Now the rest of the money they're still raking in is paying the actors salaries, and even IF they break even with the theatrical release, how much will they make on marketing items like shirts and Blu-Ray releases, etc.

These developers need to realize that piracy for the most part will not be so bad in the long run. I pirated SkyFire web browser, iPhoto, iMovie and various others, but I now own legit copies of all because I don't want to drop money on something that I don't want, or something that doesn't work as expected. "It's one dollar for an app, quit being a cheap jerk!" I hear being cried out, well nuts to you, it's my dollar, and I'll give it to deserving developers..

 

[rkevwill]

These days, you have to have a jailbroken iPhone if you truly want to take advantage of the device. The kinds of developers that are making these unusable apps are not real developers.

If I had an app, I wouldn't mind it becoming pirated, that's one of the best ways to become popular.

The war is on, it's really on.

My iPhone is not jailbroken, and I make full use of the device. To say developers making unusable apps are not real developers, is basically naive. Hackers and jail breakers know, or should know, that they are doing things that are not supported. Caveat emptor, and live with what you get when you jailbreak!. Reminds me of back in the days when a lot of us were hacking satellite cards, and getting free TV. We would gripe whenever they changed the codes on the card, and we had to come up with workarounds, but we knew what we were getting in to. Saying pirated apps become more popular, only means the FREE ones become more popular, the developers are being left out of the loop, and being denied their Due and $.

Saying the war is on, is again naive. Apple can break jailbroken iPhones with each update if they wish. And then, outside of the hackers coming up with a new fix, there is nothing you can do.

 

[icebox93]

Look at this way: purchasing JB apps is like purchasing off the black market, so to speak. The purchase comes with a risk. I'm not saying the developers are crooks or the apps are no good or anything like that. I was just using this as an analogy. Apple is very protective of the products they sell and they have no problem booting an app out of the App store for violating their rules and I can only assume that some developers will not want to risk that especially if it is their sole source of income. Know what I mean?


Just Me, D
(Tapatalk - iPhone 4S)

Wrong. Purchasing a jb app is purchasing a legal product from a legal source. jailbreaking is not something that apple can stop legally. They can say whatever they want, but notice that even though they are quite litigious when it comes to their patents, they have not sued a single jailbreaker even though many, if not all are known, or easily traced. So why is that? It isn't black market at all, which is by definition an illegal market, or market dealing in products obtained illegally. Neither is the case with a jailbreak.

Now developers can choose not to deal with me because I'm jailbroken, but I'll remember that, particularly if they want to do business with me in other contexts. If jailbreakers who were prevented from using TW's app started cancelling magazine subscriptions and letting them know this was why, they might change their tune quickly. I've got no interest in the Time Warner apps, so I don't care about this, and I've never been prevented from downloading an app yet. So I don't think it's that common yet. What apps have this problem?

 

[Timhewitt]

What Apple is most likely to do, in addition to continuing to close the security holes that allow jail breaking, is to block access to iTunes and iCloud services to jail broken devices.

You can jail break. No law against it. You do give up your access under license to Apple's iUniverse should they wish to stop you.

As for my comments on support costs above, we log the call volume by device type, model and whether or not a device is jail broken. Jail broken devices account for 80% of our support volume, and the first two years problem solutions in that space were principally related to issues on the device, not related to our apps.

The key to a successful $0.99 sales model is high volume, low support costs....

 

[Lenerdosy]

The Jailbreaking community will overcome this anti-jailbreaking development, because they fight for the little guy. The developers are really now just supporting the pirating community because they are the ones who will bypass the restrictions with hacks and cracks.

What everyone doesn't realize is that the only way to make a device 100% secure from every form of attack is simple: don't make it.

Case and point: The on-going development of iOS software. Apple tirelessly tries to patch their software, but the dev team works just as hard and finds holes in their security. Apple patches, dev-team unpatches/breaks through.

As someone said earlier in this thread, us Jailbreaker's are a small percentage of the total iOS users, even smaller of that percentage are the people who pirate app store apps. How much revenue are they ACTUALLY loosing to piracy? If 5% of Apple devices are Jailbroken, I'd say -maybe- 20% of those are for the sole purpose of piracy. Let's do some math here..

1.5 Billion apps - Assume half are "paid" programs
12 Million iOS devices - Assume 10% are jailbroken
1.2 Million jailbroken devices - Assume half pirate (gross over estimate)
600,000 piracy laden jailbroken devices. Are they REALLY going to pirate ALL 750,000 apps?

The movie industry said that piracy is killing them, yet The Avengers raked in 200+ million on it's first opening weekend, paying for the entire production and salaries of staff. Now the rest of the money they're still raking in is paying the actors salaries, and even IF they break even with the theatrical release, how much will they make on marketing items like shirts and Blu-Ray releases, etc.

These developers need to realize that piracy for the most part will not be so bad in the long run. I pirated SkyFire web browser, iPhoto, iMovie and various others, but I now own legit copies of all because I don't want to drop money on something that I don't want, or something that doesn't work as expected. "It's one dollar for an app, quit being a cheap jerk!" I hear being cried out, well nuts to you, it's my dollar, and I'll give it to deserving developers..

Ahmen to this post. I will admit to having pirated apps from time to time. I got back into bike riding and there were 3-4 apps in the app store that did gps, track speed, etc that were all paid. I downloaded all, tried them all out figuring out which ones drained my battery the worst and which ones did exactly what I wanted. After a week I bought the one that did the job the best for myself and supported the developer while deleting the others I hadn't liked. Piracy is looked down on but isn't always as bad as people make it out to be a lot of the time.

 

[Eileen89]

I found this problem the other day when I downloaded Skype for iPad. Luckily the problem was fixed by installing "xCon".


Sent from my iPhone 4S using Tapatalk.

 

[veegee1]

being locked out of app store

My problem is just the opposite. I jailbroke my new iphone 4 back in last June I believe and, while it has run perfectly ever since, I do not want to update the operating system becasue of all the hassle to go back and re-jailbreak and then having to re-set the phone and re-install Cydia apps, so I am stuck on 4.2. My problem with the app store is that I'm running into many apps that say require 4.3 or higher or 5.0 or higher to install. I have yet to come accross an app that says cannot be installed because of jailbreak. To those who have more experience than I do - is it really a hassle to update the operating system and then re-jailbreak and then have to reset your phone back to where you had it? Or is there a more simple, direct solution???

 

[Just_Me_D]

Wrong. Purchasing a jb app is purchasing a legal product from a legal source. jailbreaking is not something that apple can stop legally. They can say whatever they want, but notice that even though they are quite litigious when it comes to their patents, they have not sued a single jailbreaker even though many, if not all are known, or easily traced. So why is that? It isn't black market at all, which is by definition an illegal market, or market dealing in products obtained illegally. Neither is the case with a jailbreak.

Now developers can choose not to deal with me because I'm jailbroken, but I'll remember that, particularly if they want to do business with me in other contexts. If jailbreakers who were prevented from using TW's app started cancelling magazine subscriptions and letting them know this was why, they might change their tune quickly. I've got no interest in the Time Warner apps, so I don't care about this, and I've never been prevented from downloading an app yet. So I don't think it's that common yet. What apps have this problem?

You took my reply out of context. I was not saying that JB apps are illegal in any way, shape or form. I used the "black market" analogy to convey a risk. As I've stated several times prior to this post, I am arguing, or at least trying to, that developers have a right to configure their apps to not work on JB devices and that is the 'risk' I was referring to in regard to *this* thread about JB users getting locked out of the App Store. That is not a slight on the JB community nor do I have a problem with anyone JBing their devices.


Just Me, D
(Tapatalk - iPhone 4S)

 

[ModeratorOMD]

What Apple is most likely to do, in addition to continuing to close the security holes that allow jail breaking, is to block access to iTunes and iCloud services to jail broken devices....

Again, I would have to disagree with you there. It is not in the developers best interest, nor should they have and business dabbling in this. They should not develop an app with Jailbreaking in mind. Are you just going to update your app every time a new jailbreak comes out?

It is not prudent for a developer to do this. Windows doesn't develop their software to say "Muah hah hah, this won't be working on Macs!"


When you run Windows software on a Mac IT RUNS.

 

[Fausty82]

Again, I would have to disagree with you there. It is not in the developers best interest, nor should they have and business dabbling in this. They should not develop an app with Jailbreaking in mind. Are you just going to update your app every time a new jailbreak comes out?

It is not prudent for a developer to do this. Windows doesn't develop their software to say "Muah hah hah, this won't be working on Macs!"


When you run Windows software on a Mac IT RUNS.

Again, it's within the purview of the developers to do as they wish... as a business, Apple must do what is in Apple's best interest... which may or may not be what is in the apps developer's best interest.

And the "Windows on a Mac" analogy doesn't work. Apple uses an EFI BIOS to prevent their software from running on a non-Mac... but if you want to install Windows on a Mac, go for it. It's a computer with virtually the same parts as any other computer on the market. The difference is that when you run Windows on a Mac, it's all Windows... the Mac people encourage BootCamp, Parallels and other dual boot or VM type software... and software written for Windows won't run within OS X without some assistance from virtualization... so it's not the same... Apple doesn't like the jailbreak process, and they don't have to help it along or support it. They are free to try to block it with technology... but as long as the LOC maintains the waiver to the DMCA for jailbreak, it's not against the law.

 

[ModeratorOMD]

If Windows wanted, they could prevent their software from being run on Macs, with boot camp and all.. same principal.

We actually got swayed off of the original topic for the one guy who posted who was "supposedly" an app developer.

Nobody knows who he is.

 

[Rockdog97]

blah blah blah blah.... 10 pages of it...

 

[sherlock]

Jailbreaking is not the same as piracy. I would hope that most jailbreakers do so to control what and how their iPhone can do and look - not to pirate. I agree with the OP on many if his points.

Bottom line Jailbreaking isn't illegal, stealing is...

 

[Timhewitt]

Jailbreaking is not the same as piracy. I would hope that most jailbreakers do so to control what and how their iPhone can do and look - not to pirate. I agree with the OP on many if his points.

Bottom line Jailbreaking isn't illegal, stealing is...

Not all jail breakers are pirates, but all pirates are jail breakers....

None of our apps (more than 60 now) will run successfully on jail broken devices and revenue is up significantly. It was well worth the effort for us.