Last week, I jailbroke my iPhone. This means that I can install applications without having to use the Apple appstore. Of course, this is nice. Outside of the appstore, there are lots of packages that you can install and applications that haven't been published by Apple (yet). I mainly jailbroke it because I wanted to use SyncJe for SyncML stuff.
When the first generation iPhone was there (without SDK) I understand that there was a need for jailbreaking, but nowadays, with a huge appstore, this need seems to be less, at least for normal users. iPhone hackers obviously want to be able to install additional tools on the device, but what I noticed is that the software that you can dowload on a jailbroken iPhone is often pretty crappy. Stuff crashes or doesn't really work the way you want it to (if you can install it at all; SyncJe doesn't on my phone). Since there are lots of free packages at the appstore, I prefer using them, in favour of the ones you can download from other sources. Another problem with these non-appstore packages is that there seems to be a huge number of sources, all providing different packages. Currently there are 2 installer packages (Installer.app and Cydia) which both contain a subset of available packages.
I like centralized repositories that contain packages that went through a quality check. The same applies for my Linux systems, where I don't want to add 100 extra sources to my apt config, just to run specific software, from which I don't know the quality. Of course, the whole appstore thing creates a vendor lock-in, which in a way is kind of bad, but on the other hand often guarantees some sort of quality control.
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