At iPhoneUserGuide we are finding more and more apps simply crash or don't work as they should with Jailbroken devices... Facebook bombs out constantly, Skype simply won't work and we're also finding a lot of games are not performing like they should...

Is jailbreaking REALLY necessary any more? That's another discussion... however developers are now hitting back at the complaints from users... Strange Flavour are the makers of Warpack: Grunts, and this is what they have to say:

We had a big problem on the launch of Warpack: Grunts when it turned out that some players who had Jailbroken their devices were getting crashes at the start of the game. Obviously this got us a whole bunch of bad reviews. Very very few of them mentioning that actually, they'd broken their phone. I also had quite a few emails from Jailbreak users asking if we were doing it deliberately and when would we fix it. So I'd like to clarify a few things. Firstly, there was no deliberate attempt to block jailbroken devices or mess with them. The bug is entirely in the jailbreak software itself which obviously has a glitch that's causing the problem. Whatever it is, it causes Grunts to crash on some devices when installed after the jailbreak takes place (one fix is to install it first, then jailbreak). It happens that Grunts is one of very few apps that shows this bug in the jailbreak software at the moment, but the bug's there and will probably cause you other problems at some point. Secondly, the problem is, there's absolutely nothing we can do to fix this problem. Grunts is written as an iPhone OS application and has no problems when tested against a real iPhone or iPod Touch. Jailbroken users have to understand that when you jailbreak, you are modifying your device and no longer benefit from the concept of a standard devices that apps can be tested on. So it's entirely up to you as a jailbreak user to fix any issues it may cause. We had a big discussion after this problem came up about what to do for future builds. We ruled out testing against jailbroken phones because there's no way to do it properly. The very nature of hacking an iPhone device makes it an untestable entity. Each one is done differently (that's kind of the point) and none follow any standards. If we added a whole suite of tests and modifications to suit jailbroken devices, we'd use up time we could use a lot more productively to work on updates for the users who haven't broken their phones and new games. We also discussed possibly blocking jailbroken users as a future policy. For the moment we ruled that out too, as jailbroken users are about 12% of our legitimate users (they're around 25% of them as far as stats are concerned, but half of those stole the games so we don't care about them). This is a policy we'll be monitoring as things go on though. If there's a 10% chance that any game that's released will get a chunk of bad reviews because a section of players have installed something else that randomly breaks stuff then we may have to reconsider this policy. So, Jailbroken users. Please remember that your iPhone or iPod isn't a standard one, we don't mind that. But if your non standard installation is causing you problems, it's up to you (and the jailbreaking community) to fix the problem.

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