Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.

Before the iPhone 3G was released and the Apple App Store unveiled, people were performing a process called ‘jailbreaking‘ their iPhones – meaning that they were modifying the iPhone’s internal Operating System in order to install an extra program like Cydia, which could then be used to download extra applications of the user’s choosing to their iPhone, to do with as they pleased.  Noting that this was before Apple started officially selling applications through iTunes, it was a major advantage to do so.  Now, with the advent of Apple’s official store, many have said that as the app store reaches some kind of maturity that the need for an unofficial store has subsided.  For the most part, this is true.  Developers worth their salt will most likely go the official route, make their application available through iTunes and then reap in their hard-earned profits.  (Well, 70% of the profits, since Apple keeps 30% of every sale.)

However, with the increased drama recently about the App Store’s ‘childish‘ policies, many have been turning back to unofficial sources like Cydia.  For example, the following are applications / utilities available form Cydia, but not officially from Apple’s App Store:

• Clippy, giving copy-paste support system-wide.
• xGPS, turn-by-turn GPS navigation.
• LockCalendar, allowing you to display upcoming events on the iPhone’s home screen.
• Winterboard, allowing full customization of the phone’s UI.
• Qik, enabling live video streaming to the Internet over the cell network or Wifi.
• Cycorder, allowing video to be recorded and saved to the phone.
• PDAnet, allowing you to wirelessly share your phone’s internet connection with a PC /Mac – especially useful if you have a free internet usage allowance on your phone.

While for some of the apps listed above, Apple may not want to destroy the ‘perfect’ UI they have created for their users – I’ve witnessed a couple of people who have royally crapped up their iPhone by putting some ridiculously ugly colours on it using Winterboard.  However, things like copy-paste, video recording… this should be built in by default, right?  (That’s another question that I won’t get into here.)  Anyway, Cydia currently remains the only possible way (abeit unofficial) to get these extremely useful utilities onto your phone.

Apple made quite a stir this week by saying that jailbreaking your iPhone is out and out illegal, on the grounds that you have to modify some of their operating system files so that you can install Cydia in the first place, which is illegal (according to them) under the DMCA.  Good luck claiming that.

Combine that with Cydia launching their own version of Apple’s App Store (previously, the applications in the Cydia repository were largely completely free), and you have some direct competition between the official and unofficial route.  In some of the cases listed near the start of the post, the applications that were rejected by Apple for some reason or another made their way directly onto Cydia, and became hugely successful.  Will the fact that developers can now make a fair chunk of money hosting their applications on Cydia – with the developers themselves deciding when it will become available, what updates to push and when, with greater access to the phone’s core functions – and therefore bypassing the outrageous Apple approval process altogether – hurt Apple’s profit margins?  Or make them change their attitude to this whole ecosystem?  Time will tell.