That’s why Apple has the oft-criticised ‘remote kill switch’ in place; an App in the wild can be remotely disabled. Sure, it could have done some harm in the mean time, but will be kept from the majority of users.

This is stuff I’d hate on a desktop, but is required in the mobile market.

I ran my 1st gen iPhone jailbroken obviously, and my 3G has been jailbroken and put back to normal many times. The lure of the jailbroken apps brings me there, and I purchased Labyrinth for my 1st gen before the AppStore existed. But I’d never buy a jailbroken app these days, no point especially with what 3.0 has in store. Regardless of anything, and how good the Aptget system is on a linux box (or macports/darwinports/fink on OS X) a jailbroken iPhone, for me, is much less stable than a non jailbroken one.

The copy paste ‘clippy’ mostly works well, but screws up with many apps (eg WiFi discover when scrolling through large PDF’s, bookmark, come back and you can’t scroll) and battery life goes down.

I’m against AppStore style control for desktops, but I think most people would have to admit that it’s better than the alternatives for a mobile phone.

I hope Palm / Nokia / Blackberry / Microsoft etc get their act together and give Apple some competition, because they have no hope anyway (The boat has left… iPhone 3.0 is like the Windows 95 of that era, nothing else stands a chance for awhile to come) IMO, but Apple needs the competition.

Of course, Jay Freeman could go crazy tomorrow and schedule an update that scrambles everything. That’s part of the Web of Trust. The difference, I guess, is that Jay is asking us to trust him, while Apple is forcing us to trust them (or more accurately, their code review process).

And I’m not sure why you defend Apple’s record on this point. Aside from releasing apps that violate their own standards (only to pull them off later), the App store has plenty of applications that barely work. I’ve downloaded (and *paid for*) a couple of apps that iTunes refused to copy to my iPhone 3G or iPod Touch 2G claiming they are “not compatible”, and similarly I’ve had applications that run, but function nothing like the description, or they launch and freeze the phone forcing me to power down, etc.

If somebody were to release a harmless looking app with obfuscated code that shipped the user’s personal data to a remote location N days after installation (where N is some number longer than Apple’s code review process), I am not at all convinced Apple would catch it. The experience of App Store developers so far is that the folks doing the code review are not exactly the bright sparks of the computer science world.

Linux & Mozilla & OpenBSD & FreeBSD & even Darwin have shown us for 10 years that open source improves security. Yet we keep jumping on every overhyped, ballyhooed, proprietary bandwagon as if it is *finally going to solve* the malware problem once and for all.

Well, I sincerely hope the App Store doesn’t let an iPhone equivalent of Blaster or Nimda get through the net. But we’ll never know, will we? That’s the beauty of the closed process!

I suspect you haven’t spent much time looking into the Apt Package Managment Tool. If you had you might realise that it – to extend to car analogy – has warning saying your windows are open…

I know you feel you have to knock Linux, but if you spent time looking into these things you might realise its a very good model for the Mac App Store that you mention earlier…

This is utter misinformation. Debian’s apt is one of the most highly respected software distribution tools in the IT industry and fully supports signing of software packages. Indeed, most apt implementations will not allow you to download or install unsigned packages without explicitly bypassing clear security warnings. A dozen enterprise-class Linux distributions use apt, or some GUI wrapper on top of apt, for software maintenance. As a whole, they do a much better job of staying up to date with critical security patches than either Apple or Microsoft with their respective operating systems.

Software distributed via Cydia is digitally signed, just not by Apple. Users have the ability to review the digital signature information in detail before downloading the software.

Granted, it’s just a phone, so reviewing the software distribution process is probably too much to ask of the average person. But nobody is forcing users to install Cydia.

In addition, Mr. Freeman has no real hope of enforcing a pricing model. Even if he demands a 30% cut of Cydia “retail store” price, developers can simply offer the software for free on Cydia, then demand a payment via an outside channel to unlock features. Several excellent software packages in the Cydia repository use this mechanism.

[Hi Rick - It doesn't matter if apt "fully supports signing of software packages" if signatures can be self-signed by anyone and non-signed software is also available. That's like saying it has all the security of a car with the doors locked, yet all the ventilation of a car with the windows down. Some things can't be mixed together without canceling themselves out.

Additionally, as you point out, Cydia has no way to enforce "proper" behavior, so even if it took off, it would only serve as a dirty alley for finding ugly nagware demanding too much money for a unique but low demand (and frequently stiffed) product. That would be whore-able, but to each his own. I prefer to know what I'm getting into bed with. - Dan ]

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I’ve had the chance to see a jailbroken iPhone 3G in action, with various wallpapers, more app icon rows and columns , and some very desirable apps like GPS turn-by-turn voice commands, Qik and Cycorder video recording, tethering, SSL etc.

My overriding impression was that clutter, security issues and a lack of elegant presentation overshadow the desirability of the extra functions available on the “underground” platform.

As Apple continues its software, firmware and even hardware evolution of its hand-held platform (iPhone/3G and iPod Touch so far) I have no doubt that video recording and conferencing, voice commands for turn-by-turn GPS navigation, cut-and-paste with editable spreadsheets, documents and presentations will arrive in due course, and that some of these “outlaw apps” will be instrumental in implementing these features. They will need to clean up their presentation, user interfaces and memory usage, however.

I personally am patient to await these developments, as Apple’s unique presentation and design philosophy, with its emphasis on a sweet combination of simplicity elegance and cool, is the main reason that I buy Apple devices.

There is an abundance of choice on the more established mobile device platforms for those users who require all the latest, greatest functionality yesterday…

that said, of course there are common sense improvements needed. like being able to easily organize groups of apps for iPhone pages within iTunes first just like playlists. and being able to search for apps in the Store via tags of all kinds. Apple would be crazy stubborn not to roll these out this year.