Why no "custom" roms, like Android phones?

[tok]

I apologize for the silly question, I am coming from Android and I'm pretty new on iPhone hacks / jailbreaks. On my HTC Android phone, I used to play with custom roms all the time. On Android, once you are 'rooted', you could do practically anything to your device. HTC would occasionally provide updates to the OS, and devs would hack the updates (adding / removing components from it) and provide custom update packages ready to be flashed to the device.

Why isn't such thing done with the iPhone? Is there any technical reason on why no one has ever devised a way to modify the Apple updates, add baked in root access and Cydia, and just flash that on top of an already jailbroken iphone? I am not saying at all this is easy, but I can't help but wonder why it's done all the time on Androids but not on iPhones.

 

[ericrwalker]

whited00r.com

Though this is mostly for older iPhones, and as for custom we have jailbreaking.

 

[tok]

Oh, too bad there is nothing for newer phones

 

[DDustiNN]

I apologize for the silly question, I am coming from Android and I'm pretty new on iPhone hacks / jailbreaks. On my HTC Android phone, I used to play with custom roms all the time. On Android, once you are 'rooted', you could do practically anything to your device. HTC would occasionally provide updates to the OS, and devs would hack the updates (adding / removing components from it) and provide custom update packages ready to be flashed to the device.

Why isn't such thing done with the iPhone? Is there any technical reason on why no one has ever devised a way to modify the Apple updates, add baked in root access and Cydia, and just flash that on top of an already jailbroken iphone? I am not saying at all this is easy, but I can't help but wonder why it's done all the time on Androids but not on iPhones.

I switched from Android to iPhone last year and wondered the same exact thing. On Android, I could make an exact backup of my phone at any point in time, then flash a new ROM to try it out, and if I didn't like it I could just restore my backup. It was amazing.

With iPhone, I can't seem to find anything like that. Everything is done via Cydia, and it's all just tiny bits and pieces. I would like a simple, one-stop "back up my entire phone in it's exact current state" so that I could restore it at any time. Basically like Time Machine or Windows Restore, but I'd also like it to include all of my jailbreak tweaks since sometimes I don't remember what they all were (like when I upgraded to iOS 5, I had to individually go find all of my tweaks I liked... it was a pain).

 

[labman]

I use pkgbackup to restore and backup. Android users need to understand that the Android OS is a open source and IOS is closed source this is why jailbreaks take so long. with Android you can download apps from other sources besides the android market apple only has itunes. jailbreaking allows access to cydia etc.