Never said it was illegal. It's just not right (at least from my point of view.) Most of these app developers are not from multimillion companies. They're people sitting in their garages somewhere, looking to make money. By jailbreaking your iPod you download these apps for free, essentially stealing form these people (AKA software piracy).
That's not my understanding of what jailbreaking does. it just let's you run code that wasn't authorized- that is, it doesn't need to be downloaded from the app store. Of course I suppose this makes it easier to run pirated programs as well, but I don't think that was the original intent.
Who cares? It works.
First: Obviously I do, otherwise I wouldn't mention it, and second - what is "it"?
Steve Jobs had a pretty good explanation of his reasoning behind this in his WWDC Keynote.
Unapproved apps have the possibility of disabling with software updates. What happens if you buy an unapproved app and it breaks? You lose your money.
Ahh, but here's the thing- Apple's mantra is totally different from Microsoft's, mostly on the fact of updates and breaking changes- for Apple, it's more a "pay us a bit to get the iphone app approved (99$ a year for a standard package or 299$ a year for the more inclusive one) and we'll try not to break your app in the next version" whereas with MS they will add app shims if a popular application, regardless of vendor, happens to have problems running after a service pack or OS release. In both cases, the Application developers have your money, and in both cases, the OS vendor (Apple for the iPhone OS and MS for Windows) have taken on the responsibility for making sure they still work. The difference is that Apple in a way "charged" the vendor earlier simply to make the app available- and, (this is more assumption on my part) I assume their "we'll make sure it works in later releases" has the added implied "if we break it"... so if the person working on apps in their garage (why the heck they would be using a unheated garage when computers work fine indoors is beyond me, but hey, you said it
) makes some subtle mistakes that work ,but more work "by accident" rather then by design, changes in later releases that break the application will still be the responsibility of the "garage vendor" to fix, whereas with MS it's more a "well, your program is really popular and used by a lot of users, so it would be in our best interest to make sure it still works in the latest release, even though you clodheads don't know how to read the documentation that clearly states the right way to call the API that you've decided to pass a null pointer".
I never said I take the apps for free. I just use jailbreaking as a way of customizing my iPod to look cooler. My background changes automatically every few minutes, I can customize what certain applications' icons look like, change my battery icon (when charging), view how much free RAM is available, what my battery life precentage is, among other cool things.
Yeah, this was sort of what I meant. That is the sort of thing that Apple would <NEVER> approve of and allow into their store, because it would infringe on their "brand identity". They are still usually made by independent developers, just like the "wholesome" apps that are actually allowed into the app store. Apple simply refuses to support them.
