I saw this on Twitter before and think that it's pretty concerning for the jailbreak community. I'm missing the days where jailbreaks were constantly released and you had the luxury of choosing whether to jailbreak or not. I didn't always jailbreak every iDevice I have ever owned, but it was nice to at least have the option if something cool like the Auxo tweak came along. Oh well, I can be patient for an iPhone 5 / iOS 6 jailbreak. I'm sure it'll come eventually.
No way. If apple publicly supported it, it would almost be like another operating system and the amount of devs that would be on it would be insane. Instead of guy like chpwn releasing the best, there would be tweaks for everything and would be a very interesting place. Apple could make a lot of money if they charged $20 per device unlock. Would be a multistep process to prevent hacking the system with the warranty in the device voided. Apple is a clever company so it would work out in their favour.
Compared to the current system? One of the biggest reasons why I bought an Android phone was because the hassle of Jailbreaking (which is important to me) was becoming too annoying. Had Apple implemented samsung-like jailbreaking/ROM methods I probably would have stuck with Apple for the iphone 5, not switched platforms. Hell jailbreaking was THE reason I even got an iPhone 4 in the first place, otherwise I would have gotten a galaxy phone.
I doubt they'd actually do it. They may get $20 once, but after that you're no longer locked into the iTunes ecosystem. Many devs don't like Apple's rules, so they might just use their own distribution channels and cut off Apple's revenue stream. On the other hand, the Mac App Store is completely voluntary (you can still freely distribute Mac apps), but developers are making a hell of a lot more money from it, so Apple might not even worry about it that much. Still, I think an "official" jailbreak goes against their entire corporate policy.
