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When I jailbroke my iPhone 3G back in the day, Cydia was chalk full of amazing, useful applications that extended the capabilities of my phone. I was actually a

When I jailbroke my iPhone 3G back in the day, Cydia was chalk full of amazing, useful applications that extended the capabilities of my phone. I was actually able to run Pandora in the background while using other apps. At that time, background apps would not continue playing music, and probably could not do much else either. I had dashboards and quick launchers at the time when Apple didn't allow those things. I didn't pirate a single piece of software. It did let me use free software and apps that were not in the App store. It's well known that there were some sketchy apps in there. But how was that any different from having a Linux or Windows desktop where in you can install whatever you want? I believe that the financial motivation (the walled garden) is the biggest one, but maybe not the only one.

dkonofalski 8y ago
While it's definitely the biggest incentive, there's also a customer-focus piece. I used to do third-party repairs for these devices and I can't tell you the number of people that would get mad at me and/or Apple because they jailbroke their phone and then did something to brick it. They had someone else jailbreak it for them, so they had no understanding of what had actually been done, and then they attempted to run updates that broke them. When people expect support, it makes sense to me that Apple would want to prevent those types of situations from occurring when they're the ones that have to deal with people who don't know or understand what they've done.