…and then broke right back in.
Every single Apple blog I follow announced triumphantly that the one-stop-shopping for jailbreaking iOS 4.0 had arrived. Visit the webpage via Mobile Safari, move the slider, jailbreaking occurs. It’s all safe and legal and yadda yadda. (You know, because Apple had been taking a real hard line on jailbreakers, what with their sternly worded PR releases and all.) And I keep reading about how jailbreaking is the best thing since sliced bread because there’s So! Much! You! Can! Do! once you’re freed from the horrible, horrible confines of software that just works and looks pretty to boot.
I have to say that many of the customizations I’ve seen screenshots of look, frankly, horrible. I’m not a big fan of the new backgrounds that you can do via iOS 4.0 (I immediately uploaded this background, via Marco, because for some stupid reason Apple doesn’t include a black background as one of its defaults). But then I read about an app that lets you do lots more stuff with your texting (and I’m a 14 year old girl around my iPhone, I am all about the texting), and one that lets you blacklist phone numbers you’re tired of hearing from. Different sounds to indicate who a text is from! That could be awesome.
So I did it. I pushed the slider.
The install crashed.
So I pushed it again. And again. Because the jailbreak kept crashing. I had to check a couple of webpages to find out what the hell was going on, and after about 30 tries and at least that many webpages the answer came back: restore the software on the iPhone, retry the jailbreak.
Restoring the iPhone meant recopying all the applications and media files I have on it, so that was an extra 45 minutes or something, after having wasted about an hour on it so far. But what the hell. I wanna get different sounds for my texts.
I redid the jailbreak and this time it worked very quickly and installed the Cydia app. Apparently Cydia was getting slammed yesterday with jailbreakers, so I’m not surprised at the app’s slow performance. (No, really—no snark there.) I downloaded iBlacklist and BiteSMS.
Holy crap. Here’s my take on it, people: thousands of app settings, poorly explained and organized, are not equivalent to quality.
I played with BiteSMS for, I dunno, twenty minutes? Within five I was on their website, going through their forums, trying to figure out why I couldn’t, you know, WRITE A TEXT to somebody. I had to go to Apple’s SMS app to send a friend a text. BiteSMS never let me know when she responded. (I certainly didn’t get the cute QuickReply popup I wanted to check out.)
Then I played with iBlacklist and said, Well, this would be the coolest thing in the world, except it’s hard to understand and I have to spend a lot of time on various websites trying to figure out how X, Y, and Z work.
After another hour of playing with a few things, I said, “Screw this,” I hooked my iPhone up to my Mac, and I pushed the Restore button in iTunes. Restoring once is a pain in the ass. Restoring twice cured me of a need to try jailbreaking again for the foreseeable future.
This is why I have an iPhone. I want to download an app and have it work. I spent more time on webpages yesterday trying to figure out how to get stuff to work than I have the entire time I’ve had my iPhone. I don’t want to download MobileTerminal and figure out how to SSH stuff to my phone.
Should Apple let you have different SMS tones? Yes. And when they do, it will work seamlessly, and not with twenty different settings I have to read up on. Should they allow you to blacklist? Ohmygodyes. (Like I’m supposed to believe Steve doesn’t have blacklisting on his phone. Please.) But if these Cydia apps had to compete in the App Store they’d lose, because their UI sucks and I have to do too much work to get them moving.
I think I’m a pretty typical user. Jailbreaking was just too much work. Thanks for all the effort, guys, and if that’s what you really need from your phone, have at it. I’m glad I have a phone that works right the first time.
And themes suck. I’m sorry, themes are just the ugliest thing in the world. Android can keep those.
I’m a jailbreaker and spend much of my time doing exactly what you described, spending hours on forums trying to figure out why my lockscreen won’t display my new cygwin plugin or whatever. You are right about all of that but the biggest problem as it stands is that Cydia is the ugliest horriblest less intuitive app I have ever used.
Almost no screenshots ever, no previews, user reviews and horrible 3 scroll ads that appear on the screen that push your content down to the bottom.
I have found a few gems but damn it is a pain.
I was beginning to wonder if I was the only person who’d had this experience with jailbreaking. I’m pretty tech savvy…I just don’t want to fiddle with my devices to achieve certain ends!