Do you jailbreak your iOS devices?

For obvious reasons, I'm thinking about Motorola quite a bit this week. Before the announcement that Mo-Mobility had been sold to Lenovo by Google, I penned up a quick article about why I think Motorola's future is pretty bright, thanks to the momentum it picked up with the Moto X and Moto G. Then, "the event" happened, but I don't think that changes anything for Moto. In fact, I think it may actually mean some good things are coming their way.

In any event, I've been thinking about the Big M, and that means I've inevitably started thinking about the original Motorola DROID. I didn't think of it as such back then, but now, so many years later, I can definitely say that it was one of my favorite phones. Sure, it wasn't perfect, and that physical keyboard could have used some improvements, but for being one of the best devices to offer vanilla Android back in the day, it really stood out. And in all the right ways, which is important.

The Motorola DROID wasn't the first phone that I ever put to work with custom software, through rooting and adding custom ROMs, but it was certainly the workhorse of all devices that took on that job description. And, back then, pretty much every Android-based device I picked up was eventually customized in just about every way that I could.

Eventually I stopped rooting devices, and adding custom ROMs. Interestingly enough, I think I have the iPhone to thank (blame?) for that.

I used to jailbreak iPhones in the past, simply because it was the jailbreak community that was offering quite a bit of features that Apple's iOS (iPhone OS, back then) just didn't have. Copy & Paste, for instance. But, one of the biggest reasons I used to jailbreak my iDevices was for multitasking. I honestly couldn't stand that the iPhone didn't have it, and so I'd make sure that it did.

The platform caught up with the rest of the world, and that's when I realized that I didn't need to jailbreak anymore. And then, on the Android side of things, the stock experience wasn't as bad as it used to be, so rooting and adding custom software wasn't as essential. It helps now that the proprietary software from the manufacturers isn't bad, either.

I see someone asking in my Twitter feed, usually more than a few people actually, at least once a day if they've jailbroken some iDevice or another. Whether it's the iPhone or the iPad, it's always the same question: "Have you jailbroken ___?" Every time I see the question, I can't help but scratch my head. I just don't see a reason to do it anymore, but I know that that's just my personal view.

So my curiosity has finally gotten the better of me. If you have, or have had, an iOS-based device, have you ever jailbroken it before? If so, why did you do it, and if you still have it jailbroken, for what purpose? Let me know!