I run an ASO company, and received an offer from one of the keyboard companies for the purchase of the data of what people type into search.
Reported them to Apple as a potential security risk. Apple didn't care.
It is possible that each instance was a coincidence, but that seems unlikely.
Also, the new iOS notification system on iOS 4/5 was directly nabbed from a jailbreak tweak, though it was because they hired the developer so I am assuming it was not "copied" in that case.
Similarly, with Notification Center I've never previously heard that credited to the jailbreak community because it was always mentioned as an area where iOS caught up to Android, which also seems likely as the inspiration for a jailbreak as well.
Customers saying "I really want X" is generally just empty words with poor correlation about how much X is wanted, and you should take that with a grain of salt instead of assume that there's a demand for X; but on the other hand if there's a price attached (either a literal payment, or price of inconvenience as in this case) then seeing if customers really want this is very useful data.
2. How much did Android, etc. influence both? I don't know which specific code you're referring to but in discussions I saw the most common way these things were described was as adapting an Android feature and by default it seems a lot more reasonable to assume the influence came from a the project with orders of magnitude greater exposure and UI development funding.
I remember not using my iPhone for a year or so (switched to Android).
Next time I booted up that phone I had to click through -every- modal notification dialog in every app for that year (calendar events, emails, others). One by one.
It took hours to dismiss them all, before I could actually use the phone.
That's not a matter of taste. That just plain sucks.
I had a jail broken keyboard with two dimensional sliding which is better than force touch imo
P.S. There's another reason why jailbreaks are few and far in between. There is close to no trust between the people who create the jailbreaks...I had several good exploits that became public without my permission.
On IRC, we generally knew who did or did not have vulns and trusted not to BS. That implicit trust did make things difficult.
Although not super consequential, it seemed petty to not do it.