TeleRead: Bring the E-Books Home

Cydia: The iPhone ‘Get out of jail free’ card

By Chris Meadows

In recent months, Apple has made more and more strange and arbitrary decisions about what applications to reject for the iPhone, eventually courting a full-fledged FCC investigation.

The iPhone (and iPod Touch) is not a wimpy PDA so much as a full-fledged computer, running a scaled-down version of OS X UNIX behind that brightly-colored facade of icons. It’s just as much of a Turing machine as the computer on your desktop—just a little less powerful.

Nonetheless, Apple insists on acting as a gatekeeper, treating that computer more like a standard cell phone to which they can restrict access. However, as Wired points out in this article, the jailbreak tool and Cydia package manager offer a way out of Apple’s app imprisonment—and as much as 10% of the 40-million-device iPhone and iPod Touch userbase may have taken advantage of it.

[Note: “Jailbreaking” as discussed here should not be confused with “unlocking” a phone so that it can be used on competitors’ cell networks. The two are entirely different concepts, and require entirely separate tools.]

Life in the Cydia

Cydia is a package-manager tool modeled after the one in Debian Linux—similar to the App Store app in some ways. It allows you to select applications, download and install them—but these applications are ones that Apple either has rejected or would reject if submitted. Cydia offerings include emulators, Java virtual machines, command-line shell access, VNC—oh, and a third-party Google Voice application. An app called Backgrounder allows its users to bypass Apple’s restriction on running apps in the background and have multiple apps running at once. There are even some paid applications for sale.

Jailbreaking is currently somewhat questionable under the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. The EFF is arguing for an exemption to allow it, whereas Apple claims that it could potentially be a threat to national security. (Frankly, I’m skeptical.) There is no doubt that many jailbreakers feel that they should have more control over the device they bought and paid for, and have no moral qualms about disregarding Apple’s desires in this matter.

I have friends who have been jailbreaking their iPhones or iPod Touches since day one. I had held off on this, figuring that the apps I could get from the store were good enough for me and I wasn’t sure how mature the process was yet. Also, I wasn’t thrilled at the idea of having to re-jailbreak every time a new firmware came out.

But I was becoming increasingly annoyed with not being able to listen to Pandora.com’s streaming music app and do other things on my iPod Touch at the same time, or having to close the IRC app to check my email…then along came the Google Voice app controversy, and that Wired article about how many people use Cydia now.

I decided it was time to see what the fuss was about.

The Process

Jailbreaking is not necessarily for the faint of heart. If you goof up, you might crash the device to the point where you have to reinstall your firmware. It might even cause damage to your device (though I’m not sure how that’s possible). Apple claims jailbreaking will void your warranty (though I don’t know how they could tell if you simply wiped the device or reinstalled the old firmware before sending it in for service).

Many of the apps you’ll install will also not be as user-friendly as those you can get from the App Store. In fact, unless you are an advanced computer user or are really chafing at being unable to run more than one thing at once, you should probably just leave it alone. Even I had to have some help from my more-experienced friend to get it working.

But for an advanced computer user, the process is relatively easy. I won’t go into details here, but you simply need to be able to find where iTunes stores downloaded firmware patch files on your hard drive, and follow some basic instructions about what buttons to press when. (Be sure to back up first.) The entire process takes about 15 minutes. When you are done, you will have the Cydia app on your device—which is the key to everything else. I didn’t even have to resync my apps and music—everything was still there and worked just fine.

So, once the shackles were removed, how did everything work? Pretty well—but there were still a number of places where the polish of the App Store was visibly lacking.

Cydia

First of all, like many of the apps within it, Cydia itself has some rough edges. You can find applications by searching for them, and the search box claims it covers “Package Names & Descriptions”—but it only searches in the name. Searching on “VNC” will not pull up the VNC server app “Veency” because it doesn’t have “VNC in the name.

Installing an app takes a number of keypresses to select and then confirm the app is to be installed. Unlike the App Store, you can watch the Debian-style package installation reports on a console. You can even queue multiple apps to be installed at once. This does provide additional flexibility, but might confuse novice users.

Once apps are installed, they show up as new icons on one of your iPhone icon panels (with the exception of console apps, which I’ll get to in a moment) and can be moved around and launched just like any other iPhone application.

There is one slight difference, however: Cydia apps cannot be deleted the same way other apps can—by tapping and holding down until they jiggle, then clicking the “x”. As with Apple’s native apps, there is no “x” on Cydia-installed apps—they must be uninstalled from within the “Manage” section of Cydia. Again, this is something that could be very confusing to inexperienced users.

Terminal and the Console

One app available via Cydia is a terminal application. This allows access to the underpinnings of the OS X UNIX system: the command line (otherwise known as the console). This is something that inexperienced users should generally leave alone. However, for experienced users who know how to run console applications, this can be the key to getting a lot more use out of their device.

Cydia has many console applications available for download and installation, including many of the old Linux standbys. Because console apps will not show up as icons but can only be run within the terminal, they may confuse some basic users. Cydia offers a filter on app search so that such users need never see any console apps in their search results.

It is possible to install OpenSSH, so that the device can be ssh’d to or from, allowing power users to run programs on the iPhone or iPod Touch via a connection from a desktop computer. (The root and user passwords for the devices are widely known.) This also means that files can be copied to and from specific directories on the iPhone via scp. For example, Kindle books can be backed up on your desktop computer just as they can be from a hardware Kindle.

(For those needing to send control codes, the “Control” button is a black dot key on the right of the second symbol screen. This is a little awkward, but so is the whole virtual keyboard in the first place. I’m not sure what the meta or alt key is.)

Veency and VNC

Another way to use the iPhone from the desktop is with the Veency VNC remote desktop application. This application does not have an icon to be tapped on; instead it is always running to accept connections and will pop up a notice when someone tries to connect to the phone with a VNC client. (You can even use it in a coffeehouse setting, with your laptop; all you need to do is tap on the arrow next to your wifi connection in the Settings app to get the device’s IP address.)

I found Veency to be quite easy to use and very responsive. (All the screenshots for this article were taken from a VNC client, in fact.) And it is fun to be able to type into my iPod Touch from a full-sized keyboard for a change. (I just wish there were some way to rotate the VNC screen 90 degrees when typing into Tweetie!)

Backgrounder

This is just what it says: an app that allows you to send apps to the background by holding the home key until you get a “Backgrounding enabled” notice. It is most useful for keeping chat apps going in the background while you check your email or twitter, or for playing Pandora.com or other streaming audio apps in the background while doing other things. In my testing of it, it worked like a charm.

It should be noted, however, that Apple by and large had a good reason for restricting apps’ ability to run in the background—these devices don’t have an unlimited amount of memory, and trying to background too many things at once can lead to crashes and reboots. Backgrounder should be used sparingly, and only in cases of real need.

GV Mobile

The controversial GV mobile app actually works pretty well. It contains all the functions currently accessible via Google Voice’s Mobile Safari-compatible website and then some, and it even allows listening to voicemail or sending SMS messages.

My one complaint about it is that when you are selecting a contact to send an SMS message, it only shows the name of the contact—not the phone number or e-mail address. When you have a number of duplicate contacts, some of whom may or may not have the phone number, this gets to be a problem—and when you sync your contacts with your Google account, you can end up with many multiple iterations of the same one.

eBook and BookReader

Given that e-book apps were one of the reasons people originally jailbroke iPhones before Apple came out with its app store, it seemed like a good idea to look at the available selection. However, I was a little startled to find that there really wasn’t much of one. There are only two e-book apps on Cydia, and neither one is really very good.

But as my jailbreaking friend pointed out, the good apps—such as the one that became BookShelf—had all migrated to the app store. After all, most e-book apps are perfectly innocuous and not prone to rejection (Eucalyptus notwithstanding); why limit them to jailbreakers when they could find a wider audience?

So we are left with the dregs like eBook, whose search app didn’t turn up any titles I looked for, and tended to crash the app after a search. It gets its titles from Feedbooks, and shows text too small to read on the screen (though to be fair, you get a magnifying glass if you hold your finger down) with no way to zoom in or even turn to landscape mode for a better picture.

BookReader wasn’t much better. It does at least show the text in a more readable size, and can rotate to landscape orientation—but every time you flip orientation or change font size, the screen blanks for about ten seconds but for the words “Displaying Chapter”.

If e-books are your main interest, you won’t find satisfaction on Cydia. Similarly missing are much in the way of IRC clients (except for a couple of ports of console clients), MUD clients, or Usenet readers.

There are also some apps that simply don’t run—you launch them and they crash back to the desktop. (Perhaps they were made for the 2.X firmware and 3.X doesn’t have what they need to run.) Until I had tried some Cydia apps, I never really thought about how Apple may be obnoxious and capricious in its review process, but at least you can be sure that anything they offer for download will actually work.

I’m going to enjoy using and playing with Cydia, but I wouldn’t recommend it for the majority of iPhone users—except perhaps for those who are used to puttering around with Linux or the OS X command line.