I’m one of those in the minority of ‘unlocking but staying legal’ category. I can certainly download every app ever made for the itouch illegally, but I’m not going to do that.
I don’t say this to toot my horn but to note an interesting problem I ran into this morning. Dungeon Hunter went from from $4.99 to $.99 today, and having had some extra coin from doing surveys, I decided that today was a good day to spend a dollar.
Except, the app store repeatedly informed me I had no space. The app is 266MB, and I had 350 free (76 apps, can you believe it?). After I began deleting apps and videos, the increased space didn’t make a believer out of the app store. Hard rebooting didn’t help.
So what was a user to do? Most sites (including apple.com) suggested doing a full restore. Given that I’d lose my jailbreak, my save games, my saved calendars, plus would have to reload every app, that didn’t seem like a particularly good idea. Instead I used Cydia, installed openssh, used winscp and poked around.
The file layout isn’t all that different from linux; however, Apple in their infinite wisdom decided to scramble the names of every file (why? this makes no sense. If I have gotten this far, what difference does it make?) so after some careful poking and prodding, I found a video file that never properly deleted. It didn’t really make much of a difference in space (100MB), but it gave it enough of a kick in the rear that I could install the app.
Jesusphone’s little brother, the itouch, isn’t as bulletproof as Apple aficionados would have everyone believe. That’s not to say it’s not a great device – it is – but Apple could simplify matters by making the device slightly more open. Downloading each file and running it was a waste of time… but definitely not as much of a waste as trying to use iTunes for Windows to backup and restore (a process that would easily take 2+ hours).
Related posts:
2 Comments
Reading that has tempered my desire for an iPhone. What a pain in the butt. Bah.
All my apps seem to be randomly crashing lately. I might just have to do a fresh install anyway. Bah.