Jailbreak iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

It seems that jailbreaking of iOS devices become a really profitable business, at least for Kevin Lee, a George Mason University senior, who managed to earn $50,000 a year by jailbreaking and unlocking iPhones. At first, it was a hobby for him that eventually grew into a real business with 30-40 clients per week asking for jailbreak, Cydia installations, graphical customizations and “unlocks” to use the iPhone on wireless carriers otherwise unsupported by Apple.  To achieve success, Kevin posted posting a “Get Your iPhone Jailbroken Today” ad on the popular online community. That helped him to get hundreds of requests. But his business goes against Apple’s rules and as far as we know, at that moment his ad was already removed from the site.

This week Google has released a new version of its client app for Android Market, which will work on any smartphone running Android OS 1.6 or higher.

The company aims to facilitate the process of discovering new software and its purchase. That’s why new Android Market will have a Cover Flow-like style of app listings and include new categories like Widgets and Live Wallpapers, as currently the catalog is filled pretty much with these kinds of software. Besides that, app pages will now have more info and links to related content.

Some changes were made to the policy of software returns. If earlier user could take his money back in case he didn’t like the app he bought within 24 hours, now this time is shortened to 15 minutes.

As the number of Android devices continues to grow and it becomes hard for developers to make their apps hardware compatible with as many existing handsets as possible, Google presents its new solution:

“To make it easier for developers to distribute and manage their products, we will introduce support for device targeting based on screen sizes and densities, as well as on GL texture compression formats.”

Another important feature of new Android Market is a new limitation of app file size, which is now extended to 50 MB (earlier it was 25 MB). This is still 40 times smaller than the current limitation for iOS apps (2GB). This can be explained by the fact that iOS apps can be downloaded not only via its mobile client (like apps for Android), but also via iTunes, that can be connected to the Internet in any possible way and thus capable to download such amounts of information. Nevertheless, some developers pass this limitation by offering tiny apps for Android that can download necessary files (like music, textures, video) of any size after its purchase.

However, Google’s attempts to create a rival to an App Store still are not successful as they can be. AppleInsider has studied the subject and revealed that the Android’s openness has led to a number of cases when popular titles like Radiant were cracked to be used as illegal copies by “97% of players in Asia, 70% in Europe and 43% in North America”. That’s why most of developers like Rovio (which created Angry Birds) offer free versions of their apps to earn money from showing the ads. But that kind of income is not as profitable as offering paid apps, which makes iOS more attractive for developers than Android.

It was also noted that Android Market offers poor security for users, though this situation can be changed by cleaning up the store. At least, that was what the developer of DoubleTwist Jon Lech Johansen advised Google more than a half a year ago, but the company has not still made any steps in that direction.

Multiple developers and users testing out the iOS 4.2 betas claim that the AirPlay functionality was definitely removed from Apple’s iPhone 3G. AirPlay is gone from the golden master version of iOS 4.2. In fact, the AirPlay did work on the iPhone 3G at the previous betas. There are no any reasonable causes why the AirPlay was cut from the GM version.  Perhaps, Apple is trying to get users to upgrade to their latest iPhone model or, on the other hand, it is just an issue in the GM seed. May be the AirPlay functionality will return in iOS 4.2 public release. Anyway, there will undoubtedly be a jailbreak that can re-enable it.

If you’re interested in theming your iPhone/iPod touch, but don’t want to jailbreak your device, there is now a solution. Using iPhone Explorer, you can now change an app’s icon to something you like better. Best of all, the software is free!

All you need to do is open up iPhone Explorer and navigate into the app’s folder, located in /Apps/appname.app/appname.app.app (where appname is the name of the app you want to change and devicename is the name of your device). Within that folder, find the png file that is the icon, named something like icon@2x.png for an iPhone 4, or Icon.png for iPhone 3GS and below. Back that up and replace it with your own icon. Make sure the icon is in PNG format and is 114×114 pixels for the iPhone 4, 57×57 for the iPhone 3GS and earlier. After rebooting your phone, you should see the old icon replaced with your new one.

This trick will only work with third party apps, which means that you are stuck with the icons for apps that come with your iPhone.

Cydia, the jailbreak App Store, is without a doubt the symbol of jailbreaking.  Rock, a second App Store, has had some success of its own over its 18 months of existence. Well, times have changed. Saurik, Cydia’s creator, has now acquired Rock and will merge it into Cydia. As a result, all apps, licenses and so on will be moved from Rock to Cydia over the next couple of days. This will bring the total number of available jailbreak apps, themes and extensions to over 20,000. As for Rock, it will be shut down.

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