tech-company, mobile-apps, brandCurrently, at my company we develop apps for the standard app stores. We have had some ideas though that wouldn’t be passable on the Apple App store even though they don’t involve piracy or any illegal activity.
There is the possibility of releasing these apps on Cydia, the app store for jailbroken devices. Would we risk harming our image if we release products through this outlet? Do people have a negative perception of jailbreaking?
I’m not sure whether individuals have issue with the concept of jailbreaking, but I do think the conceptual “system,” as they say, does. Not to mention, I don’t really imagine Apple would be too keen on having legitimate apps be placed on an illegitimate app store.
I tend to think of jailbreaking kind of like I think of things like the Darknet or torrent sites. Yeah, they can be used for totally acceptable things, but they can also be used to radically unacceptable things. Of course, jailbreaking is still a little more respectable than piracy or whatever nonsense is going on through the Darknet, but I think the stigma is a bit the same. Not to mention, the user-base is probably pretty similar on each too.
So yes, in my personal opinion, I think you could risk harming your image. I think it could also be totally fine, but there’d be a risk. I think it would depend a lot on what your app did, and of course we know nothing of that through your question (with good reason), but if it was something really cool and there was no way to make it work on the official app store, that would be okay. But that would be an exception to a general rule, so you’d have to be ready for the people to don’t bother looking at what your actual app does, and just pay attention to the fact that you launched it there.
It’s really just a trade-off, ultimately, like anything is. Do you think your app will be cool enough and popular enough amongst the demographic of people who jailbreak their phones, to warrant risking the respect of other, more legitimate outlets? I think that “demographics” matter is also important–remember that there aren’t really a lot of people who do that, so be careful to weigh the potential risk against the potential gains of such a targeted release.
It would also depend a bit on what apps you’ve already released, and in particular, how many apps you’ve already released. If you’ve got one on this app store and twenty successful ones on the legitimate one, that’s much less of a deal than if you have one on this store and one on the legitimate one.
If your app is accessing the phones chip “that goes bing”, and that is an important feature and apple is not allowing you to access the “bing”, I think there is no harm in placing the app on cydia.
Make clear in all links to the store that you are sorry you cannot place it on the apple app store, but you don’t want people to miss out the “bing” experience.
It might be just the little distinction between your company and the next door guys who stick to the textbook and don’t bother doing the “bing” feature.
Also many of the apps/widgets that are on cydia sooner or later end up in the normal iOS products, I remember jailbreaking my original iPhone just to get the WLAN switch when swiping over the status bar.
Consider that the Amazon app-store is basically the android equivalent of what you are describing - it can't be found on the Google Play store, and requires one to go down into the settings to allow it to install, and yet manages to be quite successful. I doubt that many others could pull this off unless they were open-source, but it's an example nonetheless.
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