Why the AppStore works the way it does, and why its perfect, and why poeple shouldn't b*tch.
In the jailbreak community, packages can do whatever they please. there open, so to speak. An example of why this is terrible, is in winterboard, the popular cydia package. (ive installed this and tested everything myself, with load tests, memory tests, performance tests, and many other things, on both the 3G and the 3GS)
A: winterboard relies on a package titled mobilesubstrate, and what that does is lets programs be able to inject there own code instead of the deafult one built in from the spring board (example, when you press the home button in winterboard instead of closing the app it restarts springboard.app to let the changes you made take place)
B: what winterboard does and how it does it. winterboard lets you create a folder in a directory it creates in the system folder called "themes". what you do in there, is create directories that are identical (but in a fashion thats easier and a lot of the major directors for theming is built into winterboard) to apples current ones, but at the end the image or .plist or any file you want to replace, had a different image or code or whatever your replacing. and winterboard forces the phone to load that one, instead of the default one, enabling you to make any changes to the system that you want without harming the original code.
C: Why this is bad. seeing as there are no limits or moderators, anyone can replace anything with whatever they please. Apple spent years optimizing this operating system for the hardware to work flawlessly, to the last detail. and most random hackers just dont have that kind of attention to detail. Example: the main image type used on the iPhone interface is .png. although apple, uses a specific variation. they created there own type of png, with the compression information and color spectrums and tags after the image, instead of before it in the code line. this enables the image to be loaded into the integrated video card, which shares the same processor as the main one, to load the image before it decompresses it. this also helps battery, ebcause it saves lots of processor cycles. seeing as the iPhones main harddrive is a flash drive, that is horribly slow. so this makes the drawing of the images considerably faster, because it can decompress it, without either having to work from the drive, or load it into ram, decompress it, and then delete the image from ram after its done. but every single theme, ever, uses regular formatted pngs, with the data before the code. this is no problem on a computer, with fast harddrives, separate video cars, and much bettr hardware, and that don't have to keep the battery times as long as possible running always on as peoples phones, with limited space so its still portable.
and this slows general performance of the phone to where loading of new images are much slower, and drains battery, just the type of compression used in the png. and not to mention every single time you use the touch screen it has to check to see if you have anything installed to inject code, or permit the original. whicth uses many processor cycles, and drains battery because of this.
now thats only images, think of what people would do with plists, fonts, apps, and everything else.
it just makes the phone, well, crap. and the soul reason this phone is so great, is how optimized the operating system is. if they let it run loose like the palm web OS, people would be getting frustrated at how slow there phone always is, and having to monitor closing apps themselves, and so much more.
apple taking control, is the soul reason for how intuitive, easy use, feature full, glicth-less, and non-jerky the iPhone is, which is all the reasons its successful, and why none of its competitors make it in the same field.
To sum it up: because people are stupid and will fu*k it up if there given the access, and then people will b*tch at apple that they made a crappy, laggy, no battery, crashing-all-the-time product. you have to remember: the main bulk of people using this product, dont know how it works. and for the people that do, we still have jailbreaking if we feel the need to change something silly, or just have a peice of mind that we have the power to (haha i changed it so that when i type my pass code wrong it says "suck is b*tch instead of saying tryagain). and thank you gehot/devteam for making a jailbreak with jsut as much attenion detail as apple has, so the jailbreaking process itself dosn't mess things up
