Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wowfunhappy | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There a plethora of reasons I still Jailbreak my phone, but some off the top of my head:

• Put an extra column of icons per page on my homescreen.

• Rename apps on the homescreen, and change their icons.

• Enable the iPad's "grid" app switcher on my phone.

• Remove the stupid app bar in Messages.

• Hide various UI elements around the OS and in apps, to make everything cleaner. (Cool note: you can use PermaFlex to hide nearly any arbitrary element.)

• Downgrade apps that release updates I dislike.

• Stop Apple News from creating "personalized" recommendations that would keep me in a filter bubble.

• Play audio from Youtube videos (in Safari) while the screen is locked.

• Install a Userscript that gets rid of AMP in Google search results.

I realize a lot of these things are nitpicks—some maybe even personal eccentricities—but taken together they just make my phone a lot more pleasant to use. I would not buy an iPhone I could not Jailbreak, full stop.

> Play audio from Youtube videos (in Safari) while the screen is locked.

You have a long good list of reasons, but this one is fixable by installing the YouTube app and paying for premium.

If Google tried to charge for background playback on desktop, the extensions would arrive within days. iOS allows Google to get away with it, but that's precisely the problem with iOS's model.

Besides, I don't want to install a separate app. It's a website, and I should be able to use my web browser.

Edit: Also, this patch doesn't just work on Youtube, it's for any video in Safari.

I use invidio.us to listen to YouTube videos in the background and it works great.

For Android we've already got this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

> If Google tried to charge for background playback on desktop

To be fair premium includes lots of things, including unlimited music streaming ala Spotify, ad free YouTube etc.

You’re not paying only for the background playback. Literally no one would be willing to pay for that. It’s just a minor perk, that’s all.

A perk you said you’d be willing to risk JBing your (expensive) phone over. Most people would probably be more willing to just pay the fee for what is a fairly decent music streaming service.

You COULD play YouTube videos in the background by default in Safari up until about summer 2016. Then, they sneakily added a hook that kills it if it loses focus. But sometimes there's a race condition or something and it doesn't take, so videos will still play audio in the background sometimes, and you could fool it for awhile by requesting desktop version of the YouTube page.

Point is, this was there by default, and they intentionally sabotaged it to force you to use their paid service. This is shitty malware-like behavior and I do not want to encourage them. I would not give them a single cent and I happily spent time to defeat it, because fuck them.

In your outrage, you are completely missing the point.

I don’t care about anything you’re saying here about how things are or were. Really. Not one bit.

I was merely saying that for that -one- particular reason for jailbreaking, a much simpler alternative exist (from a layman perspective).

That’s really just factual information, contributing to the discussion if you like, and downvoting me because you have grudge with Google and Apple is utterly misguided.

I just don’t like being extorted.

Neither do I but it's not even the extortion part that prevents me for signing up for a service like that.

It's knowing that they will link my viewing habits to my Google account and never delete them.

This fix brings a problem that now you're paying to be tracked and profiled. It may not be a problem for everyone but...

or write your own small app to do that :) there are a bunch of ways and premade libraries to get Youtube to deliver videos straight from its CDN. Then just play them using av foundation and add some features you want.

I'm paraphrasing, but if you think you can hack your way to individuality, you are not so smart. Check it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/04/12/selling-out/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com