To Jailbreak or Not

For those who don’t know, the iPhone is locked up tight by Apple and the only things you can do with it are add apps available in the App Store.  You can read a few of my complaints with the platform here.  Fortunately for those of us that aren’t happy with draconian rules and standards, not mention Apple’s “its my phone but I’ll let you use it” mentality there is a way around this.  Its called Jailbreaking.  Jailbreaking is basically a software hack that opens up the iPhone and allows non-App Store apps to be placed onto the phone.  Its really simple to do, especially if you aren’t trying to swap carriers, and adds a lot of functions to the phone that aren’t normally available through the App Store for one reason or another (Using undocumented APIs for example).

I debated doing this, especially with my upcoming deployment, I even jailbroke, unjailbroke, then jailbroke again.  In the end I decided to leave it Jailbroken because I like to use the device I paid for my way.  I am an intelligent human being and aware of the risks involved in using “unsupported” software.  Unfortunately for Apple, the things available through jailbreaking make the process worthwhile. 

Some of the things you can do with jailbreaking:

• Add Theme Support (Thats a pic of my iPhone)
• Add Real MMS Functions
• Software Tweaks
• Video Capture
• OpenSSH – Terminal CLI Connections
• Hide unused undeletable icons

Most of these apps are free or inexpensive and add a lot of the missing functionality to the phone that most other phones have now days.  Unfortunately, there still aren’t any Bluetooth Profiles or disk mode support (that I can find).  These are probably too base level to be safe to hack in at this point.  Finally, if something goes too far awry with the jailbreaking, you can just restore the phone in iTunes and you are back to a clean iphone, no permanent damage.  Nothing with jailbreaking involves hardware.

I was having a discussion today and basically, someone said that enough things are available via Jailbreak that you don’t need the App Store or Apple.  Unfortunately, if that turns out to be true the iPhone will go the way of the Newton.  You need cash flow behind a product to keep the product alive and continue to innovate the platform.  If the App Store dries up, then the iPhone will go away and Jailbreaking with it.  Its all symbiotic. Apple, just needs to find a way to open the platform up a bit and allow some of the best Jailbreak apps a way into the system legitimately, even just legitimizing the Cydia Installer would be good.  That will continue to push more innovation into the platform and possibly make it better than it is today.  Unfortunately, Apples track record is just the opposite and they will probably keep tightening the noose till they strangle themselves, esp in this economy.