Four Island

While I love my newly jailbroken iPod, I really do have to say that I think the word "jailbreak" was a poor choice for the process of opening up your iPod. To some people, the subword "jail" means that the process is illegal and bad things could possibly happen. This couldn't be farther from the truth. Jailbreaking is the name of a perfectly legal method of opening up your iPod so that you can run homebrew apps on it. I jailbroke my Wii last year and no one batted an eyelash, though I admittedly didn't call it "jailbreaking" at the time.

Basically, in this post, I want to run though exactly what jailbreaking is, what it isn't and why it might possibly have a bad reputation. This was sparked by the fact that a few days ago, when I told someone I knew that I jailbroke my iPod, he was astonished that I would do that. I asked him why and he said "Well, that means you get all the apps on the App Store for free!"

....

"Whut?" I spluttered. "That's not true."

"No, it is!" he yelled, "Jailbreaking is illegal!"

It turns out that his poor source of information was a friend of his that I wouldn't normally consider to be the most intelligent person ever. He apparently learned somewhere of a hack allowing you to pirate apps that utilized a jailbroken iPod and automatically assumed that that was what jailbreaking was. He also decided that jailbreaking was dangerous and could destroy your iPod after he, note, went into Settings and deleted all of his content. Manually. By himself. And he blamed it on the jailbreak.

....whut.

Sure, I won't deny it, you could theoretically use a jailbroken iPod to pirate apps, but that's not what jailbreaking is for. To quote Wikipedia:

Some jailbreakers also attempt to pirate paid App Store applications. This focus has caused some strife within the jailbreaking community, as it was not the original focus of jailbreaking and is illegal.

iOS (Apple) on Wikipedia

Jailbreaking is not the act of pirating apps, it is the act of using a bug in Apple's software to install a third-party app. It's for those people who want to write iPhone apps but don't want to have to pay Apple $99 a year or those who want to write apps that do stuff outside of the official API (like the awesome Scrobbl (live scrobbling) or Backgrounder (true multitasking)).

Also, jailbreaking started out with a completely different use. Not many people know this, but when the iPhone first came out, there was no App Store. There was literally no way to get apps onto your iPod... other than jailbreaking it. And that's what jailbreaking is really for: getting apps onto your iPod. The only reason piracy got dragged into this is because jailbroken iPods allow for the installation of apps that haven't been approved by Apple, and could therefore do bad things. As stated earlier, piracy is not the intent of most jailbreakers and my brother's claim that "If you say 'jailbreak' to any American, they will think you are pirating apps" is a complete falsity. And not a true one, either. :P

The other reason that jailbreaking has a bad name is because there is one other illegal thing you can do with it: SIM unlocking, which is the act of allowing the iPhone to use another network besides AT&T. In America, AT&T has a monopoly on iPhones (which is technically the reason the iPhone was created--as a secret deal between Apple and AT&T) and using a network other than AT&T with your iPhone is not allowed. However, this is basically the extent of bad things you could do with a jailbroken iPod; Apple has even said that they will not attempt to break jailbroken apps other than ones that perform SIM unlocking. So you don't have to worry about anything; unless you are actually trying to do something illegal, your jailbroken iPod is protected.

Last thing: the claim that jailbreaking your iPod is dangerous is also untrue. I've had my jailbroken iPod for a week now and it's not a brick yet (though SpringBoard did crash once, but that was easily fixable by uninstalling an offending app). The claims that you can destroy your iPod while jailbreaking it are too unrealistic as most jailbreaking methods require you to install a new firmware on your iPod and iTunes will automatically make a backup of your device when you do that, so that you can restore to a working firmware if anything goes wrong. Also, with the new jailbreak that I pointed out last time (which is awesomely codenamed Star :P), the entire jailbreak is done on your iPod and has a very small chance of failure (though it is suggested that you backup your iPod with iTunes before jailbreaking anyway).

So there it is, folks. Jailbreaking is awesome and there is nothing wrong with it unless you are trying to make there be something wrong with it. I want to write Maze Of Life for the iPhone; is that wrong? No! Not at all. :) Incidentally, the original reason that I preferred a BlackBerry over an iPhone is the fact that you can easily write programs for the BlackBerry, but now with jailbreaking, you can do that for the iPhone too! Yay!

Also, I just wanted to point out that I am awesome and a trend-setter as after I jailbroke my iPod on Monday, TimTam followed suit. Drifty has jailbroken her iPod, as well as a few others', apparently. :P Jailbreaking for the win!