Jailbreak Or Jailbreak Not, There Is No Try

As a member of the geek community, I tend to get asked a lot of tech questions. As soon as people see the screen on my iPhone, the first question I get is “Wow! How did you do that?” I have non-standard icons, an awesome unlock screen, and the ability to answer texts without unlocking the phone. Should you jailbreak? What is jailbreaking? Let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Jailbreak

In geek-speak, a brand new iPhone is in jail. Jailbreaking would set it free from Apple’s tight grip. The benefits?

You get full access to the phone. Jailbreaking was developed after the release of the original iPhone in order to allow for third party applications, since – back then – the iPhone SDK* was not available, the App Store did not exist, and only “web apps” were able to run on factory iPhones. Developers and hackers wanted to enable the user to use the iPhone in ways that other smartphones were being used – with a myriad of third party programs. They developed such programs as WinterBoard (to change icons and background), SBSettings (to allow one-touch access to commonly used settings), and even found a way to get custom ringtones on the device (would anyone buy any other phone that didn’t allow for custom ringtones?). Due to Apple’s unrelenting control in the way third party applications interact with the device, the iPhone is severely hampered. Jailbreaking fixes all that. Here are three specific examples:

1. My biggest complaint with the iPhone is the inability to run background apps. There are exceptions to this rule – such as Apple’s few “chosen apps” (you can listen to the iPod while surfing the Internet, but not to Pandora). You can’t record video screencasts of apps in action. You have to quit an app to send a text message. Jailbreaking has solved all of these: no longer do I have to quit an app to send an SMS – iRealSMS (our review here) allows me to text from any open program. In fact, I can even reply or send a text while the phone is locked. While this seems like a small change, for me and for many others that text alot (I hear Alex is a big fan), this one change completely turned my opinion of the iPhone OS around.
2. My second biggest complaint with the iPhone is battery life. Jailbreaking doesn’t have a direct effect on this, but many jailbroken apps do. One of the popular apps that jailbreakers download is SBSettings. It allows the user – from any screen on the phone – to touch the status bar (the one at the top with the time, battery life, etc) and drag down, which displays a list of commonly used settings. The user is presented with such options as to turn on/off 3G, Bluetooth, phone mode, and WiFi. There are options to change brightness, respring (restart the OS without a hard shutdown), and even change the look of the program itself. Turning off active radios can lead to a dramatic increase in battery life, and SBSettings makes these settings much more accessible.
3. After I purchased my first iPhone, I (ironically) began to appreciate Windows Mobile. The fact that I couldn’t see a list of upcoming calendar events from the lock screen was one of my biggest gripes with the device. Jailbreaking solved that. Intelliscreen, by Intelliborn, is an app that displays items such as recent mail, news, and weathero on the lock screen.

There are many more apps that I could describe. However, the aforementioned jailbreak applications are the most important to me. Satirically, Apple has removed apps from its App Store, only to have them reappear as jailbreak apps. Some of these include PodCaster and Google Voice. There are also emulators for the PSX, Super NES, GameBoy, and other gaming consoles; MXTube allows you to download YouTube videos and keep them on the phone. There are hundreds of non Apple-approved apps and at least two full non-Apple app stores (Cydia, Rock Your Phone) for you to explore once you open this Pandora’s Box of awesomeness. While the sandbox that jailbreaking provides is really cool, the real beauty are the many new and ultra-cool toys (apps) in the playground.

Or Jailbreak Not

If Apple is the cool kid that owns the playground, you would be upsetting it if you started to play with toys it doesn’t want you to play with. Truth be told, the official Apple App Store is getting better – with more APIs being available to developers with every iteration of the iPhone OS. That makes many question the relevance of the jailbreak: as Apple makes the iPhone more open, the value of jailbreaking drops significantly – especially with the baggage that comes along with the process.

A jailbroken iPhone is a very fragile creature: install the wrong set of programs and BAM!, you are looking at a phone with a corrupted OS. I go through this about three times per month, and I am very careful about what I install. This is not that difficult to deal with, but seeing an iPhone screen with a sad face on it can be scary if you are not used to hacking technology.

Perhaps the biggest inconvenience with a jailbroken iPhone is the fact that you don’t get to install software updates immediately after they leave Apple’s headquarters. That is, not until the jailbreaking community finds a way around whatever new safeguards Apple has put included in the latest software revision. This process usually takes a few days for point revisions and can be months for a whole new OS (if at all). The newest jailbreak for the 3G S requires certain files to be saved so that the phone can be further jailbroken – not the most user-friendly of tasks.

Security also takes a back seat when you jailbreak. When you bust down the sandbox walls to play on the swings, you allow the ants in. Due to its severe limitations, the iPhone remains one of the most secure phones on the market in factory conditions. It has had a total of two bugs that are real security risks – which is simply awesome given that the device has been out for nearly three whole years. How can it be so secure? It’s the same reason apps can’t run in the background or have command line access: it’s a sandbox that keeps the user safe. Once jailbroken, however, it is much easier to run malicious code on the iPhone. While no major exploit has been discovered for jailbroken iPhones, this is still a very serious risk. So for the time being, security when it comes to the jailbreak is a double-edged sword.

What about the legal side of things? As of right now, the jailbreak stands on very shaky legal ground. There is no law that says it is illegal, and even the DMCA kinda-sorta supports it (search DMCA, reverse engineering for interoperability). So why worry? Apple is actively trying to curb the efforts of any and all exceptions to the DMCA that expressly allow jailbreaking of phones to be legal. The long and short of it is that it’s not illegal… but it’s not legal, either.

There is no try…

Jailbreaking is not something you should do if you are inexperienced with technology. I jailbroke a friend’s iPod Touch; it didn’t take the first time around and the iPod got stuck in a restart loop. Even though I fixed it, the owner freaked out. These are very valuable devices that can be irrevocably damaged. Seeing as how the price tags display several hundred dollar amounts, it’s a risk to say the least. If you are at all nervous about ruining your device, do not do it. I have yet to lose an iPhone or iPod to a jailbreak, but I know it is a possibility. Here’s my easy-to-follow recommendation: if you are comfortable with running beta software on your local machine (not of the Google Beta variety), you are most likely going to be comfortable, if not happy, with the jailbreak. If you are a person that does not know what version of the browser you are using, the jailbreak is not for you. While it is simple to use, the potential problems you may face could be well over your head.

*iPhone SDK: a software development kit (SDK or “devkit“) is typically a set of development tools that allows a software engineer to create applications for a certain software package, software framework, hardware platform, computer system, video game console, operating system, or similar platform (Wikipedia). In a nutshell, it allows developers to easily write native applications for a device. In our case, the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Posted in App Store, Apple, Decisions, Featured, Jailbreak, iPhone