Skype + Jailbreak = Sad Users

iPhoneHacks reports: Skype released their much-awaited VOiP iPhone App late last night on the App Store. Unfortunately, users who have jailbroken their iPhone and installed jailbreak apps have observed that Skype’s iPhone app is very unstable and crashing very frequently. If you’re one of them then there is a solution to fix the crashing problem.

However, the good news is that developer of Mobile Substrate, Jay Freeman (aka Saurik) has released an updated version of Mobile Substrate which fixes the problem (temporarily). He is still working on a long term fix but as a workaround; he has disabled all Mobile Substrate based hacks while Skype’s iPhone app is running.

This means that you cannot use VOiP over3G (to make calls using the Skype app over a cellular network as many had hoped) or Backgrounder (which would allow you to run Skype app in the background to overcome limitation of iPhone’s SDK). If Skype’s iPhone app is crashing on your jailbroken iPhone then update Mobile Substrate (to v0.9.2803-1 or higher) via Cydia.

If you had uninstalled it based on our earlier suggestion then it is safe to reinstall the latest version of Mobile Substrate. I used Skype’s iPhone app after re-installing the latest version of Mobile Substrate didn’t observe any crashes. It was very stable. The other interesting thing is that folks at 9to5Mac have found that you can make VOiP calls over a data network using Skype’s iPhone app on an iPhone running firmware 3.0 beta which works over only Wi-Fi Networks with iPhone firmware 2.2.1 or lower.

I guess it’s a glitch rather than the feature of iPhone firmware 3.0 as it’s something carriers wouldn’t be too happy about. It’s also reported that the app is quite unstable on firmware 3.0 in case you have thoughts of upgrading to firmware 3.0 beta just for this.