Why China Has More Demand on iPhone Jailbreak than the U.S.

According to the statistics from pod2g’s iOS blog, Internet users in China are the top visitors of the Web site offering jailbreak tool, evasi0n, followed by the United States and France. Nearly 3 million Internet users from China visited the site, accounting for 20.12 percent of visitors. The country with the second-most number of visitors was the United States with 2.5 million users, contributing to 16.88 percent of traffic. The popularity of evasi0n jailbreak is tremendous. Within the first 10 minutes of released last week, it saw over 100,000 downloads. And now it had crossed the 1.7 million mark. China is widely seen to have a high software piracy rate, though the government has been working hard to improve intellectual property rights protection. It is to believe the piracy of desktop software will slowly reduced, the unhealthy practice may now shift to mobile sector …

Jailbreak for Chinese iOS users basically means they are able to download most of the popular apps/games on so-called third-party iOS App Store, for free. We know jailbreaking the iOS device is NOT a good thing to do, but it’s not just about the free-download of the pirated apps. There are two main reasons for Chinese people desperately need jailbreaking for their iPhone and iPad. First, the laggy Apple’s App Store. The connection in China is stupidly slow, properly there’re no dedicated server to China. It could take more than 10 minutes to get a simple app like FlipBoard or Facebook to be downloaded. For those apps with size over 100 MB are really a painful experience. If you want to subscribe some magazine on Newstand, it takes ages to download one issue. Local third-party iOS App Store such as PP Assistant and 91 Assistant consequently become the best option for Chinese iOS users, which is fast and convenient, and of course you need to jailbreak your iOS devices first in order to use it.

Downloading apps from iTune is painfully slow in China.iOS original default Chinese input vs. localize Baidu Pinyin input.Next, we come to the Chinese input method. iOS’s default input method for Chinese is rather difficult to use. The size of the screen has limited the speed of typing Chinese characters using QWERTY keyboard. The new iPhone 5 does not provide a bigger screen with a wider width, it just become longer which doesn’t improve the convenient of Chinese input. Switching between Chinese and English is user un-friendly, the number of Chinese vocabulary is also very limited. Jailbreaking the iOS device can allow Chinese user to install their familiar input softwares which are made by Chinese internet companies. Those localized Pinyin Input can let user type at least 2 times faster, thanks to the more accurate of predictive phrases. And not forget about the old-school T9 input method which was applied to mobile phone in the early, it’s still widely used by many Chinese phone user. The rapid and efficient of T9 keyboard is very good to input Chinese Pinyin.

For now, China and the United States are Apple’s top two markets, so it makes sense that they are at the top on iPhone Jailbreak. Tim Cook said it won’t be long before China overtakes the US. Seriously, Apple really need to pay more attention on Chinese customers, especially their using habit. If the Cupertino is pissed off by the jailbreaking issue in China and still want to boost the iOS revenue in the communist land, please gets those issues fixed first. Many many Chinese iOS users will greatly appreciate this.