Firmware updates and thoughts on paid Jailbreak apps

3.1.3 Firmware is latest in the game of tennis between Apple and Jailbreakers- but the losers in the game could be those of us who have paid for jailbreak apps that we’d lose forever if Apple succeeds in eliminating Jailbreaking.

On Tuesday Apple released the most recent revision of the iPhone OS firmware, which was shortly followed by the usual dire warnings from the devteam for those with Jailbroken devices to not upgrade until they had gotten the chance to test it out and determine whether the existing tools would still jailbreak the devices or if Apple had plugged some of the exploits that allow the Jailbreak to work. The fallout of it so far is that it safe for older devices (non-3G/3GS iPhones & 1st gen Touch) to upgrade if they’re not concerned with unlocking, but that it may be a while before those of us with newer devices can upgrade- rumor is that the new firmware closed the exploit that both redsn0w & blackra1n use to jailbreak the devices. Reading through the list of what the new update includes, there’s not that much that is very compelling for me to care about not being able to upgrade to it for now- this isn’t altogether surprising for it being a rather minor (X.X.1 increment) update. The timing of it along with another date that’s rapidly approaching though gave me a bit of pause.

The date I’m referring to is the Feb. 7 end of the (recently extended) trial period for the incredibly useful LockInfo utility for Jailbroken devices. You probably heard Kevin and I talk about this in our ‘things we want to see in iPhone OS 4.0′ segment, but this really useful little utility puts a massive amount of info on the lockscreen for your device that can be accessed without having to unlock it and go into the mail app, weather app, or even Twitter. It’s an incredibly useful feature to have (albeit one that as I pointed out has some potential privacy concens should someone pick up your device…), and I’ve been planning on shelling out the $5 to purchase it once the trial period ended since I definitely want to continue being able to use it as it saves a good bit of time. However the situation with the newest firmware made me stop and think about it a bit: if the next firmware update is a serious ‘must-have’ upgrade but it means losing the jailbreak, potentially for good, it means I’m out the money spent on the Jailbreak apps for good.

Granted, we’re not talking huge amounts of money here- even counting buying LockInfo, I will have spent less on Jailbreak apps than on a dinner out or, for that matter, what I spend on App Store apps over the course of a few weeks. Still, even if I don’t use many beyond their initial testing, all of those App Store apps are still available if I wanted to put them back on the device and use them. Any of the paid jailbreak apps exist largely at the whim of being able to Jailbreak the device.

Looking over the list of ones that I’ve paid for, there’s little doubt in my mind that they’ve been worth it- in reality I get more use out of many of them than I do most App Store apps of an equivalent price. And since the probability is that we won’t see the next major firmware upgrade (4.0?) until the new iPhone is released- presumably in June from what the indications are- I’ll get a good amount of bang over those 4 months for the $5 that LockInfo will cost me to buy. But it’s still a bit of a mental hurtle to overcome.

It would of course be nice if Apple would finally just play nice with the Jailbreak community, but both their public statements and actions trying to keep it from being tacitly sanctioned as a DCMA exception and their more overt moves like the changes in the firmware make it pretty clear that they’re not going to be doing this anytime soon- and unfortunately the actions of those who use the ability to Jailbreak to use illegally obtained copies of paid apps from the App Store and the amount of coverage this has gotten make it unlikely that they’re going to change their tune anytime soon. There may even come a time when it may not be possible at all to Jailbreak iPhones and iPod Touches- it was quite a while before the 3GS could be jailbroken, and presumably the next-generation iPhone will take a while to find an exploit for.

I’ll just have to keep on hoping that Apple ends up incorporating the best of what makes Jailbreaking so useful into their next major update so there’s less of a pressing need for it.

No Comments

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.