Category: Software

Thanks to @musclenerd (who linked this on twitter) I have recently read this text about how jailbreak is bad, and how jailbreakers are all criminals. To put it simply, I don’t like when someone, who has no idea about a topic, writes with such a bias and confidence.

But let’s be fair and review all the points mentioned in said text.

1. “a major company decides to lockout a tiny percentage of its customer base for the greater good of all other users” Of course, every company has the right to ban user from accessing their service, if said user does not follow the license agreement. But is it really for the greater good? Is it a coincidence, that the author of the Mobile Notifier has been hired by Apple? If Apple was so dedicated to eradicate jailbreakers, why hiring one of them? Apple knows, that jailbreaking community is a source of innovation, and a field trial for new, unstable features.
2. “get underneath the iPhone’s operating system, hack it into something different entirely, and use their iPhone as less of a tool and more of a tinker-toy for their geek hobbyist fantasies.” sorry, but as far as I know, modifying phones, cars, tools is peoples own choice. Did they pay for their iPhone? Yes. That gives them right to do anything with it, including microwaving it or dropping from height. Or jailbreaking. Of course, some of these actions will void the warranty, and majority of jailbreakers accept this fact.
   On a sidenote, another major smartphone manufacturer, the HTC company allows their users unrestricted access to tinker with software of their phones. This made the company very successful, and a dedicated community of developers is creating ROM images, programs and tweaks, which increase the base functionality of their phones. See XDAdevelopers.com.
3. Their agenda is clear: they consider iPhone users who don’t hack their iPhone to be “in jail” and must be freed. This “jail” is nothing more than disallowing the administrator access to iOS (to defend Apple’s busines model, but thats another story). Mac’s for example don’t have such a restriction and users have free access to root account.
4. “Apple Stores flooded with mainstream users whose iPhones are no longer reliable, usable, or comprehensible” this is the risk of people who jailbreak their device. These people more often than not, know what they are doing, and thus they know about the risk. Jailbreak can almost always be removed by restoring to a stock software package.
5. “stealing pay-for features like tethering without paying for them” stealing tethering? Didn’t the user pay for the data plan? Yes. So it’s their right to use that data plan, tethered or not, because they paid the operator for the data transfer. Only a handful of mobile operators in the world put an additional charge for enabling tethering in their terminals. The majority don’t care about how their users use the data plan as long as they paid for that plan.

It seems, that the author of the mentioned text fails to understand what jailbreaking is, what is it used for, how the jailbreaking community works, that there is world outside of AT&T, and that there is a percentage of people in the world, who are innovative, creative and know how to improve stock software.

PS. I have been running jailbroken iOS on my previous iPhone (2G) for quite a while, because I had to unlock it (so I could use it outside of US), and to enable features like MMS messaging and a few others.