CrudeByte, developers of JACK Audio Connection Kit for iOS, has announced that the app is currently broken on iOS 7 and they don’t expect to be able to fix it.
Here’s what they have to say about it:
Apple introduced a new policy with iOS 7, which prohibits any Inter-Process Communication (IPC) among third party apps. That’s the actual reason why JACK currently crashes on iOS 7, because all IPC mechanisms are now blocked for all third party apps.
Without a way to communicate with other apps, we have no way to use or fix JACK for its purpose on iOS 7.
It is unlikely that JACK will ever work again on iOS 7 upwards.
While JACK offers some unique features, it arrived on iOS after AudioBus and has not achieved anywhere AudioBus’ level of adoption. And, with CrudeByte saying that they don’t expect to get JACK working on iOS 7, updated apps are unlikely to support it.
Let us know what you think of the state of JACK on iOS 7. Is it a loss for iOS musicians – or just a technological dead end?
via Someone who loves Jack, discchord
It’s a pity, because among the chaotic world of inter-app communication systems on iOS this one was the most interesting feature-wise.
Agreed. I don’t understand how this is so different to how IAA and Audiobus work. If anyone can educate me, please do.
Jack was not working for me even on IOS 6. I clearly do not understand the use of Jack
I’m with Igor, I never was able to make anything happen with Jack on my iPhone- and it wasn’t for lack of trying! And I’m not completely lame, I’ve always been able to figure out more advanced stuff like OSC and the like.
IAA is just unreliable. Good thing Audio Bus is so robust and idiot-proof!
On one hand, I can see why Apple is trying to “protect” users from a variety of glitches that might be introduced by third party apps working in this way.. OTOH, Jack was a good example of adding functionality that has been needed. The mixture of Audio & MIDI of Jack was what made me want developers to embrace it. It is odd that Audiobus has somehow been given the keys to interapp functionality.
crudebyte’s port of jack is a piece of crap.
iOS Jack broke by itself before starting to try using it: the first app I had to delete and reinstall for it to work. That could be one valid reason Apple would disallow it.
It’s was free and based on pretty good open source software but the iOS port didn’t do any justice: it lacked so much polish.
So does this mean that Apple will be reimbursing all of the people that bought JACK?
And how long until they figure a way to squeeze AUDIOBUS out of the game?
Nobody ever paid anything for JACK, ever.
It is a free and open source app!
It seems like Apple tries to cripple or limit anything they feel is a threat.
I totally agree. It was similar with IOlibrary.
Funny how the mindset here seems to point at the developers fault and not Apple’s restrictions and lack of legacy support. They did approve the app before did they?
Or maybe they didn’t plan on people running a DAW on their mobile when the created the iPhone.
Now that people are running DAWs on iOS, it’s good they are standardizing inter app communication, instead of having it be a ‘wild west’.
Do you know Apple did not planned to have people making apps when they created the iphone? Steve Jobs himself said it was too big of a security risk. Then Cydia came, and then Apple realized people really wanted to make apps on the iphone, and then the app store was introduced to much fanfare.
Its impossible to plan everything people will make on your device, but its pretty stupid trying to stop people from doing great thing. It happened before with IOlibrary, wireless sync and multitasking apps for example and now its happening again with Jack. People have been trying to make DAW’s on Palm and Windows Mobile device (like Bhajisloops). Its was a no brainer that people would try to make similar apps for IOS.
As someone who both liked Jack and spent effort in IOS6 supporting it in apps, this is a big disappointment. I noticed it was broken months ago in Betas but was hoping it was going to be resolved.
The effort to add in Jack support compared to Audiobus was considerably less as noted on the Jack web site. It’s too bad enough apps didn’t support Jack since for competition sake it’s always good to have alternatives. I guess my IOS7 updates will now have to be ‘downgrades’ , ie drop Jack support
Audiobus uses the same method Jack does for IPC, Apple gave audiobus a pass on this rule… sign of Apple being reasonable with these rules once in a while.
Where did you get that? To my knowledge Apple is not making “reasonable” exceptions when validating apps. I’d would guess that Audiobus is doing something differently, using only permitted SDK calls, etc.
BS
That’s not true.
JACK actually doesn’t function on iOS. Apple approval rules have nothing to do with it. The two systems function differently. Audiobus is working; JACK is not. That’s the whole story.
It seems in this case JACK just got unlucky. But Audiobus is continuing to support iOS, and remains a strong option going forward. And JACK is still an excellent technology on other OSes. It’s really not worth doing a whole lot of analysis here, frankly, not with *two* options for inter-app communication on iOS.
Ok, So why can’t JACK just use IAA and Core midi. I mean these API’s were put in place for this very reason. IMO, The next update from audiobus may render JACK obsolete. To bad because I was hooked on the idea of free audio/midi routing.
Just like Nintendo 8-bit v. Sega Master System…that battle was won because of strength in third party libraries
Jack didn’t do Jack, or maybe Jack did and Apple is just intolerant to orientations…just saying
“Way to go Apple!”
Said the Windows fanboy! Who needs applications talking to other applications. Damn hipsters.
He. He. He!!!!
Wait, is this the same “JACK” that has been wasting Linux users time for years? Leave that trash for the open source wasters. Nothing of value was lost.
There are good reasons for both Apple and end users to want audio apps to use supported protocols on mobile devices. If an app is not being used, you want it asleep to free up memory and to extend your battery life. Forcing developers to use supported protocols makes this possible in a way that is seemless way.
I bought the Harrison Mixer app a few months back when there was a special. I could never get jack to work on my brand new MacBook running mountain lion. I spent hours with tech support and they even called me and spent hours having me uninstall, and reinstall this and then that. They eventually refunded my money and said they would get back to me as soon as they figured out what the problem was. I never heard from them again.
But the core of the problem was that Jack was not working on my machine. Weird.
Not a great loss. Jack was never really adopted by many app devs to begin with.
IAA, Audiobus and MIDIbridge are more than enough for total music solution.