Jailbreaking…. it’s just not for me.
By john on Jul 8, 2009 in AT&T, Apple, featured
A few weeks ago I was visiting a friend who had been trying to convince me to jailbreak my iPhone for quite a while. I had not done so because I really didn’t feel compelled to. My phone could do everything I wanted it to do, and did so pretty damn well.
While visiting my friend, he finally wore me down and I let him jailbreak my phone. This gave me the ability to change how the UI looked, to some extent. Beyond that, it also severely decreased system performance and stability, causing my phone to run slow when doing simple things like, say, opening my sms messaging app.
Beyond that, the app to get more jailbroken apps was slow, somewhat confusing to navigate, and not all that helpful. Some apps worked on the 3.0 software platform, others didn’t. I was never fully sure which ones would work and which wouldn’t.
Overall, I found the experience to be about what I expected it to be – too much hassle for too little gain – i.e. not worth it.
To a point I can see why some people Jailbreak. The phone doesn’t offer them everything they want, and jailbreaking is a way to freely get what they are looking for out of their device. They forgive the flaws and drawbacks, the performance hit, etc in the name of having that one killer app that they just can’t live without. There ARE some cool apps out there for jailbroken phones, and you can still take advantage of the app store – but you have to wait to upgrade to a new phone OS – including patch updates – until it’s been jailbroken.
Call me silly, but one of the draws of the iPhone is that it’s a system that works. When there’s an update to the software I just plug the phone in and it updates. I don’t have to wait, I don’t have to worry about being able to use some of my apps. I don’t have to re-add those apps in after an update. Everything is there, exactly like it was. Life is good. If there’s something I want the phone to do, in 99.9% of cases I can find it on the App store. in that .1% where I can’t… I can live without it.
The main complaints I had about the phone have been addressed: Cut and Paste, voice activation (on my 3GS), better camera w/video support (again 3GS) tethering (as I’ve mentioned here before) and the ability to search through my email or other items on my phone. There’s really nothing left to compel me to want to jailbreak.
I’ve done it, I’ve used it, and you know what? It’s just not for me.
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