Recommended: 30 Reasons To Jailbreak Your iPhone at The iPhone Download Blog
Our friend Sebastien has a good post up over at his iPhone Download Blog site, wwhich lists 30 ‘excellent ‘ reasons to jailbreak your iPhone. The list is mostly populated with apps that you cannot get on the App Store and features that are not currently (and likely never will be) allowed into the store by Apple.
It ‘s a good list, although I have to say that Sebastien ‘s numbers 18-20 would be much closer to (or at the) top of my list. Those are:
- Quickly manage your settings preferences with BossPrefs
- Sort your apps into folders with Categories
- Run apps in the background with Backgrounder
Check out Sebastien ‘s full list HERE.
In any case, I really haven ‘t felt very tempted to jailbreak since 3.0 came out and since I got the 3GS. Sure there are some features, like those noted above, that I would love to enjoy “ but the 3GS / 3.0 experience thus far has been more than good enough to keep me satisfied.
What about you all? Tempted by that list? Already jailbroken?
What is your main reason for NOT jailbreaking?
I don’t think the question should be, “why should you jailbreak your phone?”, but “why shouldn’t you jailbreak your phone?”
I can only think of one valid reason not to and that is “I didn’t know you could do that”. And that’s not really even a good reason.
I honestly can’t fathom someone owning and even remotely caring about an iPhone and not jailbreaking it. Really, that amazes me. When I got my 3GS, I was in hell for the 2 weeks it took for a jailbreak to be released. That was the day that I truly felt like I got a new phone.
Of course, I’m the kind of person that spends hours at a time picking out icons for my new themes and tweaking the lock screen to be just the way I want it to look. But even if that’s not your thing, you can just select a simple theme from winterboard and change the look of your phone drastically and easily in about 10 seconds. And changing the UI is just one small thing you can do with it jailbroken. And with literally no downsides (see reason #1 on the list), I just don’t know why 100% of the iPhones aren’t jailbroken.
There´s a BIG miss on that list: a decent notification system – GriP (growl for iphone)
http://code.google.com/p/networkpx/wiki/GriP
It´s one of the top five reasons….simple has that
Is that one much better than Prowl in the App Store?
it´s not the same…at all…the two can be used together…GriP will handle push notifications sent by prowl servers to your iphone, replacing the stupid popups in the middle of screen
Oh – very cool – thanks for mentioning that one Antonio!
@ Sebastien and Nacho – I've spent tons of time running my iPhones jailbroken in the past – all the way since back in the 1.x firmware days – so I know the 'power of the dark side'
Sebastien definitely listed some good things you can do if you choose to jailbreak – but I also think it's fair to say there are some reasons for not doing it as well:
For starters, many folks don't want to in any way jeopardize their warranty status with Apple – which they will if they JB. Yes, yes – I know you can do a full restore prior to letting your phone have any contact with Apple (in most cases) but I also know that there have been a number of JB apps that seem to have settings that persist through multiple restores and that give the game away – things like Make It Mine spring to mind.
Also, the whole cat and mouse game when new firmwares come out is a nuisance – as in, when firmware 4.0 comes out it may be un-jailbreakable initially – so if you're JBed, you have a choice – wait to use the latest, greatest firmware, or hold off until a jailbreak is found.
Many others may disagree, but the last time I was jailbroken I absolutely 100% *hated* the experience of using Cydia – found it difficult to navigate, and full of way too many ads. Much preferred Installer back in the day. Again, I know you've still got full access to the App Store, but if the whole point of JBing is to run apps not available via the Apple store, then you want the JB apps store to be good to use.
Lastly, as the list of things you can't do on a 'stock' iPhone has dwindled smaller and smaller, I've just been less and less tempted. Video = can do now with the 3GS. Background apps – that's a big miss, but I can get by without it for now and feel like there may be 'close enough' type solutions coming along in the not too distant future, with interaction between 3rd party apps for example. The things SB Settings does – like quick toggling on/off of services – are probably the thing I miss most. But again, not enough to JB for now.
Oh, and I'm just so impressed with the 3GS's performance and memory management that the urge not to mess with it is strong as well
I have to concur with Patrick.
I got iPhone on day 1 and eagerly jailbroke the phone very early on (lots of command line stuff – before the super automated jailbreaking methods came out) and got a huge kick out of the whole process.
Since APPs / 2.x came out, I haven't jailbroken my iPhone. There is enough cool stuff to keep me happy and I don't have the time to keep up.
I understand why people jailbreak their iPhone and I understand why most don't.
"I understand why people jailbreak their iPhone and I understand why most don't." Well said, I think that sums it up nicely.
Personally, I can't live without Backgrounder. On the 3G, it was nice to have but you really couldn't do a whole lot with it due to memory constraints. On the 3GS, it makes the phone for me. Like Nacho, during the 2 weeks I couldn't jailbreak my 3GS, I was going insane. That was mostly because I constantly toggle 3G and Wifi and not being able to do so via SBSettings was killing me. Missing SBSettings process list, dock, and an easy way to respring was making it worse. The new SBSettings even has a 'Free Memory' feature that is incredibly helpful. Once I finally got SBSettings back on the 3GS I started giving Backgrounder some play time. WOW. It really makes the phone into what it should be. Being able to keep Pandora or Last.fm running all day without slowing down the phone in the slightest bit is something I can't live without. I listen to streaming radio all day at work and it's never interrupted by text messages, talking to people with Beejive, checking twitter, searching for something on the web. Whatever I want to do never interrupts my music and the 3GS has enough memory that you can even play games while multiple apps are backgrounded. I regularly keep Flowchat and Pandora running in background while I'm working on other things.
SBSettings and Backgrounder are absolute necessities for me. Others that I would miss a great deal without being able to Jailbreak are Lock Calendar (I'd say Intelliscreen if it wasn't so buggy), Five Icon Dock, User Agent Faker, xGPS, and iMobileCinema. I have gotten to beta (or alpha?) test Stack which I will not be able to live without when it's complete. It makes organization of apps much much better (I disliked Categories). I have also recently become a fan of 3G Unrestrictor because it allowed me to download Monkey Island while I was away from any wifi spots. I used to be a huge fan of iRealSMS but it's been pretty crummy on 3.0 so far for me.
Man – you guys are wearing down my feeble resistance. How do you find battery life while using Backgrounder?
patrickj, how do you find battery life?
We you can run the backgrounder cydia app, but conserve on all other features. With backgrounder itself running, not alot of energy will be used, in comparison to lets say you playing a video game. So you might ask, conserve on all other features? what am I specifically referring to. Well go to this link and you'll see. LINK: http://www.ismashphone.com/2009/07/how-to-extend-…
Thanks – I'm aware of general battery-saving tips. What I was wanting to hear was how does battery life go with Backgrounder on, and not taking any big extra measures to conserve battery juice
well, i own a 3G and the only reason i jailbraked was video, and i feel apple is pushing us to do it by not giving us video, even if its low quality
It's interesting to see which things matter most to each of us. I like having video on the 3GS (and liked messing with some of the video apps back in JB days) but that would never be one that's enough to sway me on its own.
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