Cydia creator interview: everything you always wanted to know about jailbreaking your iPhone...

We've been dabbling in the shark-infested waters of iPhone jailbreaking over the last couple of months, and found it to be a fascinating and immensely useful way of gleaning more entertainment from your beloved Apple handheld.

It's a practice that comes under fire a lot for being closely related to the rampant piracy iPhone developers are suffering from, so we thought it was time to talk to one of the pioneers of iPhone jailbreaking, Jay Freeman.

You may know him as Saurik - the man who put together the 'other' iPhone app store, Cydia.

Jay Freeman: Apple doesn't let you do anything truly innovative and interesting in their store: they don't let you push any boundaries. Every single thing I felt the phone needed was "out of scope", whether it be an improved address book, video recording, improvements to the web browser... frankly, I am not certain why people get excited about SDK-approved development.

Cydia is not a new idea. It's simply a better way of going about the problem. The most difficult part of building Cydia was balancing the concerns of developers and packagers, integrating into an existing software distribution platform (APT), but also providing an iPhone-centric user-experience.

No one else has cared about all of these variables at once, which means we end up with products like Rock Your Phone, which partially reimplement a subset of APT they consider understandable, losing the interoperability that I had striven so hard for.

I'm sorry, but I have not seen this association come up very often. I attend (and speak at) the largest iPhone conferences and carefully watch the coverage of jailbreaking and Cydia in the major media sources (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Wired, etc.): almost all of the media and conversation about jailbreaking is about bypassing Apple's restrictions on the platform. I hardly ever see important sources connecting jailbreaking with piracy.

Yes. If you sell a great product, people are going to pirate it, and it is fundamentally easier to pirate software on a platform that's already open than one that is not. If we didn't see piracy of jailbroken software I'd be very very surprised. I don't know of any platform with such properties that doesn't have pirates.

There is technically more that Apple could be doing to stop piracy, but frankly it is a waste of time. Developers who are hyper-concerned about piracy are typically very inexperienced in marketing and sales.

Unfortunately, this inexperience is something which is a major problem in the mobile application market: the way this world is setup allows people to sell things with no prior knowledge about how to do so, who treat it like an obvious part of the problem as opposed to a tricky art and a difficult science.

Given that, Apple's marketers, who are expert salesmen, have realised that getting buy-in from these inexperienced developers involves a party-line of simply ignoring piracy. If piracy enters the public narrative then the developer-in-the-garage starts thinking they are losing lots of sales, and starts clamoring for Apple to solve the problem for them.

This, however, has a second order effect which is devastating: it means they simply cannot provide any mechanism for allowing developers to verify customers for server-side resources or technical support without admitting that piracy is possible.

So, that said, the one thing that Apple should be doing is allowing developers complete access to their customer lists so that they can verify whether a user has made a purchase before spending expensive CPU, storage, or the time of an employee on that user.

The fact that they do not do this means that it is very difficult to price or sell a product in their App Store that has any off-device interaction or cost without managing to sell it as an external subscription product (which both is a harder sell to the user and requires some finagling with App Store approval).

The term "unlocking" should not be confused with the term "jailbreaking". Also, "from iTunes" is confusing, as jailbreaking an iPhone does not in any way change the existing relationship the user has with iTunes or with the official App Store.

Jailbreaking your device opens the door to more functionality and software from third parties, whether it be video recording on your older iPhone, improved task switching functionality (including background applications), or simply a complete Unix environment in your pocket.

The real question to ask is: "What benefit is there to having a non-jailbroken device?" Would you be willing to give up control of your desktop computer to Apple or Microsoft? What if Apple only allowed certain applications to be sold on your desktop Mac, or Microsoft actively forbade alternative web browsers from being installed on Windows?

Just including Internet Explorer by default caused Microsoft to end up in legal hot water. How are Apple/Google/etc. getting away with what they are doing to mobile computing?

I have run up against only a small handful of people with such an opinion. Typically, these users and developers don't understand what's going on, and they are expressing a very knee-jerk opinion of "How do you not love our Apple overlord?!".

As for Apple, I have never been given grief by them in a direct manner. They got involved in the DCMA exception for jailbreaking, but they stayed on topic and only discussed the jailbreak tools themselves. I believe their official stance is "App Store alternatives for the iPhone do not exist".

Apple's marketing model presumes a complete control over their device. Apple does not know how to compete with an open platform. Because of this, I would be very surprised if Apple didn't make strides with every major new release to increase the cost and difficulty of jailbreaking.

Hardly anyone in the world of mobile is making a reasonable amount of money. I have only even heard of a small handful of people selling in any App Store on any mobile platform who have made enough money to justify their company, and every single one of those cases was a complete fluke.

In the Cydia Store you have a slight advantage over the official market, as A) the competition is smaller, B) you can offer something actually unique, and C) the marketing channels are somewhat more powerful (Cydia lets you develop completely custom depictions for your packages, and can include videos, multiple pages, etc.).

However, most developers aren't sophisticated enough at marketing to take advantage of C and aren't creative enough to take advantage of B, so the average ability to monetise the Cydia Store is about the same as in the App Store (although the spread is a lot less, so you are almost certainly not going to be the guy making $50/month, which is where most of the App Store developers are).