Can we sell app via another channel besides AppStore?

phongtt

Hi,

A stupid question, but till now I don't seem to find information somewhere. Hope someone know it

Supposed that I already have a game on AppStore. At least I know that I can port it and submit to other stores (of different platforms), i.e Nokia Ovi (J2ME, Symbian,...), Samsung/Amazon (Bada, Android,...).

Here the question is: is it legal to sell the game on Cydia store or some 3rd stores (which also allow user to install the game to iOS devices)??

Thanks!

techdojo

At the end of the day you CAN do what you want with your own code, if Apple find out then they might decide to pull your app from their app store but it's a guessing game.

I'd ask why you'd want to also sell a product on Cydia. I'm not sure what the market size is for Cydia apps but Jailbreaking seems to be becoming less and less of a issue, plus the ONLY reason I can see for actually bothering with Cydia is to release an app that Apple won't accept in their store, anyone with a Jailbroken ios device can still use the Apple app store

Just my $0.02

phongtt

The reason is that the current payment method of Apple (visa, master card, etc.) is very inconvenient for local user in my country, which prevents many them from buying apps.
In here they have a kind of appstore which allows various easy transaction methods

(I'm just thinking of some solutions to reach as many users as possible, even a small amount)

mykyl66

anyone with a Jailbroken ios device can still use the Apple app store

Are you sure about this? Unless something changed the opposite is true. If your device is jailbroken forget about access to itunes or anything like that. Thats the way it used to be and even if it does work it would only be for a short while until Apple blocked it again.

Mike

techdojo

My 3rd gen iPod was jailbroken for ages (prior to iOS 4.3 update) and I never had an issue with accessing the store or itunes or anything, I only used the jailbrake as it was required at the time for the dev setup I was using, but I never bothered again after the update.

@phongtt - I can appreciate that the whole app purchase process is a mess in a lot of far eastern countries, but do you have any stats on the number of jailbroken devices in your area, last time I checked the percentage of jailbroken devices was very small and getting smaller every day.

phongtt

From a local source, it's estimated ~1M users in my area.
Yes, it's just a minor market in terms of users but better than nothing