There are 100 million iDevice users in the world. The U.S. Copyright Office Monday had a huge ruling for the jailbreak community, and in fact all iDevice users and developers
- officially declaring jailbreak legal. Of course – there’s still work to be done. Monday’s ruling was a solid first step, but the road to an open mobile app market has some asphalt left to traverse.
The mobile app market is dominated by the iPhone. The Android market is estimated to do only 10% of the App Store’s 2010 income. There are a few smatterings of mobile app stores (huh? what’s a Pre?), but nothing coming close to Apple’s share and position. If you want innovative, easy to use, cool apps – you need an iPhone. It’s where the talent has set up shop.
Here’s the thing – Monday says jailbreaking is legal. But with each firmware Apple breaks the jailbreak solution, erases jailbreakers’ installed apps, and makes it more difficult to jailbreak the next firmware. New hardware checks in the iPhone 3G[S] and iPhone 4 are great examples of this continued anti-competitive behavior. Now – the jailbreak is obviously exploiting a security hole, so Apple is within their rights (and arguably within their RESPONSIBILITY) to patch these holes. The ultimate goal? No need for a jailbreak – being able to, say, install Cydia or Rock simply by dragging it into iTunes.
