Jailbreak Confessional

eeping up with this week’s round of tech posts, (I didn’t intend for it to be tech week but almost all of my posts thus far have been technology related) I’ve decided to discuss my misadventures with jailbreaking my iPhone.

When it comes to iPhone the term jailbreak has become synonymous with making your phone better, but as I have learned yet again, it doesn’t seem to always be worth it.

Back in the good old days of the iPhone 3G, jailbreaking your phone was largely free. Some big name apps cost, but for the most part everything you could want was free of charge. As the service grew and became more socially acceptable (and at some points almost expected) more and more apps cost and in most cases all of the good ones are more than I’d like to pay for an app if I can avoid it. (Anything above free better be worth it).

Desperate for a change of pace however I decided to jailbreak my iPhone 4 one last time (this was before I decided to change to the Windows Phone). My hope was that I could find a theme that would give me some of the features of said WP8 and I did. For $1.50 which I was loathe to pay unless absolutely necessary. I looked through several themes, and found that there were some options for free, but they didn’t quite like me and almost all of them required I purchase other apps which were not so free. So against my better judgement, I decided to go for broke and shell out the $1.50.

I should have known better…

To purchase apps via Cydia (the jailbreak store) one must have a Paypal account or an Amazon Payments account. I have Paypal but no money, and don’t use it for anything so I wasn’t sure how that would work. I decided to create an account with Amazon Payments which was a nightmare and a half, and that I will probably lose another dollar for. Ultimately Amazon informed me it would take 5-7 business days for them to confirm my bank and frankly after the hassle of getting the account even up I should have cut my losses and said forget it. But I finally figured out how to work Paypal to accept my credit card and bought the app.

Needless to say, I’m grateful it wasn’t more expensive. It might be fun to play around in, or too look at, but promising the ability to change tile colors (a feature I’ve yet to be able to manage by the way). I will probably go back to using it just because I can be a little cheap and I want to feel like I got my money’s worth, but I think I was expecting a little too much.

This is not the first time I’ve been disappointed by jailbreaking and I’m really not sure why I continuously try it hoping it’ll be better this time around. I really need to stop reading all these Apple blogs that talk about the greatness that is jailbreak tweaks. If you do have an iPhone and are curious about jailbreaking I recommend doing a Google search and possibly even checking out a few Apple blogs to help you. It’s a pretty straight forward process, but whether or not it’s worth the effort depends entirely upon your needs and what you’re hoping to get out of it.

For those of you who don’t have an iPhone or don’t understand… jailbreaking is a) different from unlocking which is now illegal, and b) where by use of a computer app you hack into your phone to tweak and modify the software. 

I will attempt to get back to the posts on writing, self publishing and/or design tomorrow.