The Washington Post wrote a very interesting article about the money that can be earned from simply jailbreaking iDevices. According to them, a student of the computer faculty in Washington earns around $50.000 annually by jailbreaking the terminals of all those interested. A cost-effective jailbreak and unlock service is resolved very quickly and he claims that he has several dozen clients daily and earns around $4.000 per month. Of course, among the dozens of clients there were also important people from Washington, but the student only told about a member of the Mongolian embassy who came to him to decode his terminal.
"To be honest, when I first started, I did it for my friends, myself, but it has snowballed from there," said Lee, who jailbreaks iPhones to enable new screen designs, then "unlocks" them so customers can switch wireless carriers . "I was getting five to 10 customers a week, now it's 30 to 40. I just had one customer from the Mongolian embassy who was moving to the capital of Mongolia, and he wanted to use the iPhone there."
Leaving aside the jailbreak money, the Washington Post reveals a very interesting piece of information about Cydia. According to the article, the largest underground application store for iDevices generates revenues of $10 million a year. Yes, you read that right, Cydia generates revenues of $10 million annually from application sales, revenues that are of course shared between saurik and the owners of the repos where the applications are sold. However, let's not forget the people who work hard to develop jailbreak solutions and don't accept donations, so we include them in the list.
The primary jailbreak apps store, Cydia — named after the insect that bores into apple trees — now earns about $10 million in annual revenue and counts about 4.5 million active weekly users hunting for apps. Its dominance in the jailbreak world has grown so much that last year, when a rival store began eating into its market share, Cydia simply merged with the competitor, unleashing howls about a monopoly.
Under these conditions, Cydia will surpass Android Market in a few years in terms of revenue and I am thinking of opening a service to decode and jailbreak iDevices. Who is the first customer?
