Why Jailbreak: Backgrounder

One of the most common issues I have come upon with my iPhone is not being able to carry on Instant message conversations while I am doing other functions on my phone. I have Palringo, which lets me chat on AIM, Y!, MSN, ICQ, Google Talk, Gadu-Gadu, Jabber, iChat and their own network in one app for free. The app even keeps me logged into the chat services through their server, however once I close the app, I am not told when I receive a new message until I reopen it. After some time of just coping with this restriction, I started looking around - and found my answer.  An app called backgrounder. The whole purpose of the app is to let apps run in the background. After I select an app to run in the background, no matter which app I am using, I will be notified of new messages. Backgrounder can be used with a number of apps, but for this article, we will just cover the chat functionality this will allow if your phone is jailbroken. I understand the reason Apple did not originally implement background apps is because of the possibility of crashing due to memory overflow. And I have experienced this personally a number of times. If I run one app while I have two in the background, my phone will crash almost immediately. It's become a bit of a balance, and requires trial and error to find when I have to close my background apps in order to run other ones, but once you figure it out, it is quite manageable. Setting up an app to run in the background is quite simple. You select Auto-enabled applications once you start backgrounder and select yes for each app you want to run in the background. When using Palringo, it will place a little number on the Palringo app icon showing the number of messages waiting. Another thing that I found appealing about Parlingo is that it works well with StatusNotifier, and works in conjunction with custom home screens like HomeScreen 2.0. Background apps are the number one request by iPhone users, and until Apple does a hardware update on the memory of the iPhone, I am very doubtful that Apple will include this function. It is up to us to make the iPhone what we want. Apple is a few steps behind, so lets pick up the slack by jailbreaking and show Apple what functionality we want and what functionality we can add with our own creativity. Remember that without us pushing to create new apps to add functionality, Apple would not add the functionality we want to the updates. I am the first person to admit that using some jailbroken apps can crash your phone if you load too many apps in the background, but I believe that the pros of jailbreaking outweigh the cons. All computers have a memory overflow and the iPhone is no exception.