Many of my friends own iPhones, and many are flabbergasted when they find out that my phone is not jailbroken nor is it filled with free apps.
I happily pay for quality apps. Why? It's going to cost me anywhere from $1 to $10, and that is honestly chump change for an app that will provide much more in value.
For some reason, if you give away your work for free, all of the cheapskates and losers come out and start insulting the service and/or claiming they didn't get enough support.
What do people expect when they don't pay for a valuable app...?
As someone who works on software for jailbroken phones, I just want to make it clear that jailbreaking and piracy are not the same thing.
Yes, jailbreaking makes piracy possible, but Cydia has multiple warnings about adding the repositories required for piracy. In fact, our best statistics show less than half of all the jailbroken devices have pirated an app.
I agree with your points, but I don't want people to misunderstand the point of jailbreaking: jailbreaking is about controlling your own device and doing things the App Store doesn't even conceptually allow.
You seem like you might be a good person to ask: I love the idea of jailbreaking all my devices (I did so on my 1G iPhone as soon as it was possible). However, modern-day Cydia scares the bejeezus out of me. I have no easy way to discern what's reliable, let alone trustworthy, and I wish I could know what's getting installed under the hood, especially regarding background processes and changes to the underlying OS.
Can you give me some tips on how to discern quality and safety in Cydia packages, or are these things simply endemic to the jailbroken app ecosystem?
I don't think quality and safety are concerns unique to Cydia. Why does it scare you to use it? Do you really have any way of knowing what "genuine" apps downloaded from the appstore are doing?
To some extent, there are privacy and trust issues in both places. But I have a bit more confidence in Apple's ability to police their store, and more importantly, official apps are sandboxed and can't touch the filesystem or OS directly.
But honestly, I'm more concerned with quality than trust. I think that malicious apps are probably very rare on Cydia; I'm more concerned with background processes that eat battery life, changes to the underlying OS which make the phone unreliable, buggy code with unintended side effects, etc. I don't think this is the norm, but I have very little information with which to separate the gems from the junk.
On a computer, installing apps with no restrictions is the norm, and so there are countless forms of social proof to discover which apps are safe and reliable. I'm looking for something equivalent for Cydia packages, as well as detailed manifests of what is installed and running with each install. (Perhaps I should just stick to paid packages, where the author has higher incentive to maintain quality.)
You are 100% correct, and I agree, they aren't the same thing.
But you try telling that to someone who isn't so technically inclined. To the average joe, jailbreaking probably equates to pirating, just because it enables you to do so. Just like "torrenting" isn't the same thing as "pirating," one will often find that the mainstream association of torrenting is that of piracy.
However, it makes me feel slightly better than the majority who are jailbreaking their phones aren't sailing the seven seas and looting and pillaging all of the apps that they can find.
I really hate the fact that you can't just straight up pay for more things and am deeply suspicious of free services. What benefit do you get from me using your service if I'm not paying you? In some cases, like Google, the benefit is that I can be sold to advertisers. Nothing is really free, and it's better, cleaner, and less scammy feeling to know and pay the cost up front.
If there's a free vs. paid app that I want I will always go for the paid app. I never tried Instapaper free.
I've spent a decent chunk of money at Cydia, and have never pirated software. My dock has five icons, I have always-on access to a panel that controls WiFi/Bluetooth/Airport etc, Grooveshark, oh, and of course, MiFi.
I happily pay for quality apps. Why? It's going to cost me anywhere from $1 to $10, and that is honestly chump change for an app that will provide much more in value.
For some reason, if you give away your work for free, all of the cheapskates and losers come out and start insulting the service and/or claiming they didn't get enough support.
What do people expect when they don't pay for a valuable app...?