Jailbroken and Back Again
It might be legal now, but it isn’t necessarily better.
I spent about a month on my jailbroken iPhone 3G. After buying a new car and making some other capital investments, I ended up taking myself out of the market for an iPhone 4 upgrade, and after the crummy performance issues I experienced (along with many, many others), I decided to jailbreak my phone.
There were three things that I desperately wanted, all of which I could get on a jailbroken phone.
Multi-tasking
When it was announced that native multi-tasking would be available for only 3GS and 4 users, I was irritated. I felt like I was going to be completely deprived of the joys of listening to Last.FM while emailing and tweeting… at the same time.
From a functional perspective, Backgrounder as an application is great, but requires some tweaking to effectively use (when combined with Circuitous, it works pretty well). But practically speaking, I rarely, if ever, did any multi-tasking. The only times I did were while driving and I wanted to listen to Pandora or Last.FM and use Trapster at the same time, and since there’s no hardware audio separation, one always overwrote the other. Really, there was nothing else I wanted. I am in the minority on this one, but the fact is I never really found a use for it.
Performance
Once I upgraded to iOS4, my phone was completely unusable. I mean unusable. The keyboard would not respond timely enough. Apps would crash (especially Last.FM, my favorite music app). Games were agonizingly slow (Puzzle Quest was just a horrible drag). Swiping required multiple tries. Painfully slow camera. You get where I’m going with this.
And yes, while the jailbroken iPhone 3.1.3 firmware was very good performance wise, after a while, legitimate apps would stop working. Gowalla didn’t work. After I updated Tapatalk, it stopped working. Apps would randomly crash.
Now, Cydia installed apps worked, for the most part, pretty well. The Winterboard themes were sweet, and I will miss the HTC Gruppled skin that I applied. Customizing the lock screen, the dock, and just about anything else I want is something I will miss. But the upshot wasn’t enough for me to endure inconsistent app behavior. I could only see it getting worse, too, as more applications move to using API features only available in iOS4.
Tethering
Pay an exorbitant amount for tethering? No thanks – its my data and I’ll use it any way I’ll see fit. I was always attracted to the idea of tethering, and when I jailbroke, I was excited to get this up and running (it was the first app I installed, actually).
But aside from the first few times I’ve used it to check out the speeds (3G is meh, but it’s certainly workable), I really have not used it for anything practical. I haven’t found anything important I have to do on my laptop or PC that I can’t do on my iPhone with ordinary 3G or Wi-Fi. Notice I said important - there were times when I wanted to tether just to log into Raptr when playing something on my laptop, but aside from that… nothing. If I were a business traveler, perhaps this would be more important, but with the proliferation of Wi-Fi (especially FREE Wi-Fi), this isn’t a must have anymore.
The developer in me won.
In all the things I mention above, I left out one important detail – I used cracked versions of paid App Store apps. This is face first at odds with the software developer in me who knows the value of a one-man shop’s hard work. I tried to rationalize it by pointing to Apple’s recent efforts at undermining developer activities, and their refusal to play nicely with third party charging devices… but stealing is not the way to be an activist for a cause. So while it would have been easy for me to just uninstall the cracked apps, it was the nail in the coffin of the reason to roll back. And I feel the best about this, actually.
So let’s hope that the performance improvements stick around long enough for me to forget about jailbreaking again. I disabled Spotlight, and I’m going to use a minimum number of folders (if any). Until then I’ll slowly die at the hands of the cheating computer in Puzzle Quest (it DOES cheat!) due to 3G graphics lag.
