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Strange Flavour Says Jailbreaking And Grunts Just Don't Get Along

July 18, 2009

grunts_jailbreak

Strange Flavour, the developer of Grunts for the iPhone, has been receiving a fairly large amount of complaints from jailbreak users who have purchased the game.  Users have stated that the game constantly crashes when launched.  Strange Flavour decided to address the issue on their blog, stating that it is not their fault, and that it is a bug in the jailbreak software itself. Some jailbreak users have speculated that the problem is all on Strange Favour's end, and that they are deliberately blocking jailbreak users from playing the game.  Strange Flavour has said that this isn't the case.  According to them, Grunts is just one of the very few apps affected by this bug in the jailbreak software.
"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."
Since Grunts doesn't have any problems with the iPhone OS, the developer doesn't intend to change anything.  They aren't going to try to cater to the jailbreak crowd since it would take many extra hours, hours that could be spent updating and adding to the game, to test against the various types of jailbreak software. At this time Strange Flavour has no intentions of blocking jailbreak users from using their software since a good portion of their users are running jailbroken devices.
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 there you have it.  Strange Flavour has nothing against jailbreak users, they just wanted to warn you that you are modifying your device at your own risk. Have any of you noticed issues with any other apps while using your jailbroken device? To win a download code for The Creeps!, simply leave a relevant comment about this post or about The Creeps! itself. The winner will be chosen randomly at the end of the day today (end of the day means 11:59 PM ET). Download codes are only redeemable through US iTunes accounts. Please remember to include a valid email address so we can contact the winner. Keep watching our Twitter feed and Facebook fanpage for more chances to win download codes.

Mentioned apps

Free
The Creeps!
The Creeps!
Super Squawk Software
$1.99
Grunts
Grunts
Freeverse, Inc.

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