34.6% of iOS Devices in China Are Jailbroken, According to UMeng’s Report

UMeng, the Innovation Works’ portfolio company which offers the solution that helps Chinese mobile developers to gather statistical information about how app users are using their apps, recently published a report on the iOS usage in China.

According to this report (in Chinese, download here), by end of March 2011,

• iPhone 4 is the most popular iOS device which takes 54% of the market share; iPhone 3GS takes the 2nd with 16.1%;
• Majority of the iOS devices has been upgraded to 4.1 or above;
• In average, 34.6% of iOS devices have been jailbroken. Particularly, the percentage of jailbroken iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 are close to 40%. iOS users are relatively less interested in jaikbreaking iPad, only 27% of iPad are jailbroken;
• Users are willing to use iPhone more in daytime (before 7pm), and after 7pm iPad is a better choice;
• Guangzhou, Shanghai, Beijing, Zhejiang, Jiangsu are the major cities/provinces where 52% of iOS users are based.

With jailbroken iPhone, users are able to install pirate apps from different resource other than App Store. 34.6% is not a small figure which again leaves us the question, how difficult to get paid-download model working in Chinese App market? UMeng’s answer to this seems optimistic. It published some comments on this report at its official blog saying that the number of jailbroken iOS is not really linked with the number of paid apps, and the more important is to educate the market and convincing users to pay for the good apps regardless of the popularity of jailbreak, i.e. they believe that jailbroken iOS users are still the potential paid-users. They explain, it’s hard to tell how many iOS owners have their devices jailbroken on purpose, as quite a few of them got their devices from grey market and the sellers usually offer free jailbreak service.