There were many instances in which a feature became available via jailbreak tweak, then showed up in the next major iOS revision. Sometimes implemented in almost the same manner.

It is possible that each instance was a coincidence, but that seems unlikely.

A lot of the features, seemingly taken from the jailbreal scene, were rather obvious additions previously found lacking in iOS, e.g. custom keyboards, call filtering and a common filesystem. Tweaks may have hastened.their development however I am yet to be convinced that Apple relies on other people for ideas.

Safari Private Browsing comes to mind. The functionality and UI was very similar to the jailbreak "tweak" available for this.

Also, the new iOS notification system on iOS 4/5 was directly nabbed from a jailbreak tweak, though it was because they hired the developer so I am assuming it was not "copied" in that case.

Wasn't the jailbreak just adding a quick toggle for the existing setting? (And the equivalent of the quickly available mode in most major desktop browsers at that time, including Safari?)

Similarly, with Notification Center I've never previously heard that credited to the jailbreak community because it was always mentioned as an area where iOS caught up to Android, which also seems likely as the inspiration for a jailbreak as well.

Ideas are a dime a dozen, however, it is likely that usage of jailbreaks were useful evidence about which features are so desperately wanted by people that they are willing to go through a nontrivial inconvenience just to get them.

Customers saying "I really want X" is generally just empty words with poor correlation about how much X is wanted, and you should take that with a grain of salt instead of assume that there's a demand for X; but on the other hand if there's a price attached (either a literal payment, or price of inconvenience as in this case) then seeing if customers really want this is very useful data.

Even so I don't think it would be surprising if they used the popularity of certain jailbreak tweaks to prioritise their own implementations

It'd be crazy not to pay attention to, I've no doubt they keep an eye on these things to inform their feature development

One of the things well known at that time is the notification/control menu which was not available in official ios (the official one sucks). I even heard at some point that apple hired the guy that worked on the app for jailbroken iOS to help work on that...not sure if true story.

1. “Sucks” is not a synonym for “not to my personal taste”. One of the common trends around most jailbreaks, desktop UI hacks, etc. is that some people have very strong opinions which aren't viable for general usage; one common reason for features taking awhile to mature is making them usable for the other 99% of users. When that happens, inevitably some people in the first camp would complain about their idea being stolen and dumbed down, ignoring how much more work the general case required.

2. How much did Android, etc. influence both? I don't know which specific code you're referring to but in discussions I saw the most common way these things were described was as adapting an Android feature and by default it seems a lot more reasonable to assume the influence came from a the project with orders of magnitude greater exposure and UI development funding.

> “Sucks” is not a synonym for “not to my personal taste”.

I remember not using my iPhone for a year or so (switched to Android).

Next time I booted up that phone I had to click through -every- modal notification dialog in every app for that year (calendar events, emails, others). One by one.

It took hours to dismiss them all, before I could actually use the phone.

That's not a matter of taste. That just plain sucks.