mercurious

Our iPhone jailbreaking research has concluded. We have restored our devices back to a semi-factory fresh state of firmware 1.1.2 and no longer revel in AppTapping. The inevitable occurred: compulsively updating and installing third-party apps resulted in unfortunate instability of an unknown sort. With Mail and iPod functions quitting and crashing, the only marginally useful unauthorized applications had to go without commissioning the further study required to identify the culprit. I only miss a single application, and that is Books, the open-source, public-domain e-book reader. Now, while riding the subway, iPhone is especially boring, its capabilities so “un-tapped.” A small price to pay for stability of the core applications when above-ground.

It was a fun ride, and we certainly garnered a small portion of the incredible Google search term traffic related to iPhone hype in 2006. I’m afraid we’ll be waiting out the dark period until February 2008, when the official SDK is released and a new generation of extensibility emerges for Touch applications. We also anticipate a significant iPhone firmware update at MacWorld 2008 in January to tide us over. Not to mention all the brouhaha that will sound out when the 3G version hits the streets.

In short, the jailbreak process became too arduous and the reliability of some common applications became dubious. Naturally, this is no surprise, given the fact that Apple had no reasons to support these endeavors. Indeed, the post-SDK era will involve mediation through digital signatures, and the indy iPhone developer market will writhe in pain. But, if it means that applications will be sturdy, well designed, and accountable to performance and efficiency standards, we have to admit that it’s probably worth it, having learned the hard way. When it comes to a mobile phone, the basic functions are more crucial than on a desktop or laptop computer. Things like basic communications capabilities really do, just have to work.

With an 1.1.3 update rumored to be hitting the servers this week sporting voice recording and disk mode storage, the jailbreak process promises only to get more arcane.