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I'm aware the jailbreak community often felt Apple was targeting them specifically, and perhaps they were, but every jailbreak was also exposing a security flaw

I'm aware the jailbreak community often felt Apple was targeting them specifically, and perhaps they were, but every jailbreak was also exposing a security flaw. Personally, I've never been worried about jailbreaking voiding my warranty -- I just never got sufficient value from it to make it worth the drawbacks. (Both value and drawbacks are subjective measures, obviously.) While I understand the "you must own your own device" line, that's more of a rallying cry than a useful description. (I have a similar pedantic complaint with "if you're not the customer, you're the product," for what it's worth.) It's interesting to think about a regulatory framework that mandates companies build software-driven devices with the ability for end users to do their own software loads, but figuring out how to do that in a way that doesn't let companies wiggle out of it and doesn't essentially mandate insecure back doors in all "smart" consumer electronic devices seems to me to be a non-trivial problem.

michaelmrose 8y ago
Letting the user control the device inevitably means letting the user hurt themselves that is inevitable and impossible to fix. The least intrusive method is too allow users to add additional software sources and either opt out of sandboxing wholly or totally for select vetted apps. This isnt hard it would just hurt Apples ability to get a 30% cut as third party stores would spring up. User owned personal computing devices have been a thing for decades can we not pretend this is uncharted territory?
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  The comment of yours that I replied to explicitly mentioned jailbreaking, which is not the same thing as "additional software sources." I'd like to see Apple allow users to install signed apps from places other than the App Store, and I suspect that protecting revenue is the main reason they don't. But I'm not particularly interested in jailbreaking, even though I'd like to see functionality that iOS doesn't currently allow.
  - lstroud 8y ago
    Well technically you can do that. Download code, build in Xcode, and install to your device. Probably not what you meant, but it does enable some side loading.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
Back in the day (iOS 3-4 ish?) you used to be able to install Cydia packages that would patch whatever exploit the Jailbreak originally used. This isn't the case anymore, unfortunately, because the Jailbreak community is smaller.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  I remember some of that. I didn't really get into the jailbreak scene too deeply, though. Usually, what happened is I heard that some Thing I wanted to do that you couldn't on iOS was available if it was jailbroken -- "tethering," for instance, back before that was added to iOS. I'd jailbreak the phone (which could be really easy or involve a lot of hoops to jump through, depending), and install Cydia, and install the App That Did The Thing. By that point I was usually already frustrated because the whole user experience of the software from the jailbreak side of things tended to be noticeably worse. (I'm sure there were exceptions, but in general, that was consistently my experience.) Then I would discover that the App That Did The Thing was a little buggy and not very well designed, and sometimes didn't even consistently Do The Thing, and I would look around the Cydia store and discover that there was very little other stuff that I actually wanted, and then something would crash in a way that took the whole phone down in a way that official iOS apps very, very rarely do, and I would say "enough of this" and put the phone back in jail. tl;dr: I tried to be adventurous, but was too impatient. :)

michaelmrose 8y ago

Letting the user control the device inevitably means letting the user hurt themselves that is inevitable and impossible to fix. The least intrusive method is too allow users to add additional software sources and either opt out of sandboxing wholly or totally for select vetted apps. This isnt hard it would just hurt Apples ability to get a 30% cut as third party stores would spring up. User owned personal computing devices have been a thing for decades can we not pretend this is uncharted territory?

chipotle_coyote 8y ago
The comment of yours that I replied to explicitly mentioned jailbreaking, which is not the same thing as "additional software sources." I'd like to see Apple allow users to install signed apps from places other than the App Store, and I suspect that protecting revenue is the main reason they don't. But I'm not particularly interested in jailbreaking, even though I'd like to see functionality that iOS doesn't currently allow.
- lstroud 8y ago
  Well technically you can do that. Download code, build in Xcode, and install to your device. Probably not what you meant, but it does enable some side loading.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

Back in the day (iOS 3-4 ish?) you used to be able to install Cydia packages that would patch whatever exploit the Jailbreak originally used. This isn't the case anymore, unfortunately, because the Jailbreak community is smaller.

chipotle_coyote 8y ago
I remember some of that. I didn't really get into the jailbreak scene too deeply, though. Usually, what happened is I heard that some Thing I wanted to do that you couldn't on iOS was available if it was jailbroken -- "tethering," for instance, back before that was added to iOS. I'd jailbreak the phone (which could be really easy or involve a lot of hoops to jump through, depending), and install Cydia, and install the App That Did The Thing. By that point I was usually already frustrated because the whole user experience of the software from the jailbreak side of things tended to be noticeably worse. (I'm sure there were exceptions, but in general, that was consistently my experience.) Then I would discover that the App That Did The Thing was a little buggy and not very well designed, and sometimes didn't even consistently Do The Thing, and I would look around the Cydia store and discover that there was very little other stuff that I actually wanted, and then something would crash in a way that took the whole phone down in a way that official iOS apps very, very rarely do, and I would say "enough of this" and put the phone back in jail. tl;dr: I tried to be adventurous, but was too impatient. :)