alexwhittemore.com //Blog

20Jun/096

Jailbroken OS 3.0 is a Buggy Ass Piece of Shit

crashyI hate to have to report this, but it's just sad how crappy the current experience is on 3.0-JB. In some order:

  • Cydia crashes like crashing is its job. Tap search then manage - boom, crash. Uninstall an app - 50% likely crash. click too many items in a row because cydia is slow but you know your way around - crash. In fact, you can really just imagine crashing for a split second, and it will happen, wherever you are. Restoring my phone to its previous state of installed apps was failing so badly that I installed apt and did it from an SSH session. Only to find out that Aptitude is broken. At least there is apt-get, too. But alas, I still didn't get very far, since NONE of the apps I previously had work. Starting, most obviously, with Backgrounder.
  • Backgrounder is (temporarily) dead. This isn't that critical, per se, since apps usually crash while in the background anyway, but I'm annoyed not to have it because at least Pandora would reliably stay alive while you emailed or, to a lesser extent, texted. Now, no matter which method you use to invoke Backgrounder, the invocation tanks MobileSubstrate and sends it into safe mode. Bummer. And Pandora Controls was a nice pairing for backgrounder since you could use it to control Pandora from other apps just like the iPod. Kind of a moot point, if backgrounder is dead, but
  • Pandora Controls just doesn't work, at all. Worse, it causes Pandora to crash on launch. Yay safe mode. Don't install it.
  • I could probably survive in the time being before repairs to the above by using one of my FAVORITE iPod apps, Instinctiv Shuffle. It is basically a smart shuffle hooked into the iPod app that attempts to shuffle your full library based on your mood, and it seems to work pretty well. It pretty much just makes shuffle less random, playing similar songs to the ones you recently didn't-skip, but it's a nice addition for the car. But it doesn't install on 3.0. Boo.
  • hClipboard straight doesn't work. Yeah, there's official copy/paste now, but I liked the templates feature, not having to re-enter email addresses all the time. And I liked a multiple-entry clipboard. And iKeyEx had other cool features.
  • ICY is cool, but also buggy: So far, I've found that you can reliably crash it by cancelling an app install.

And then there are a ton of other stupid issues. Like what's up with this screenshot?

What the hell.

What the hell.

There's no text entry field there, guys. And in general, things seem slower (though some faster). Overall, this could be going better.

All I can say is thank god PdaNet works, since AT&T will inevitably break the official tethering channel. I will admit, the iPhone interface for it is cooler and less goofy, but it also doesn't work (for me, won't connect). And when it does, you'll get charged out the ass for it, which is key too.