IPhone 3G Jailbreak Released, Paves Way For Open Source Apps

PainMeds writes "iPhone Atlas is reporting that the first jailbreak for the iPhone 3G has been released, and includes the popular Cydia community installer for distributing free games and applications. Since Apple's SDK was released, web sites have criticized Apple for the restrictions placed on both what developers could write and what APIs they were allowed to use. Others have noted the SDK's incompatibility with the GPL. The Cydia installer has provided a distribution channel for both open source software and software that would otherwise be impossible to build using the restricted SDK. A few applications are already out, including MobileTerminal and NES.app, a Nintendo game console emulator. In just over a week, open development is finally here for the iPhone 3G!"

Comments

Don't buy it

[QuantumG]

Buying a product so you can crack it is just retarded.

Re:Don't buy it

[clang_jangle]

I don't see how the OP is a troll. I think it is stupid to buy a locked down device to jailbreak it, especially when there are more open options available. I mean, unless you're so superficial and trendy that you just have to have the "cool look" of the iPhone, why on earth would you do something like this? I'm not trolling, just genuinely curious as to the reasoning.

Re:Don't buy it

[D'Sphitz]

Because they can. Isn't that like the official motto of geeks everywhere?

Re:Don't buy it

[Free the Cowards]

The reasoning is not very difficult:

1) I like the hardware

2) I don't like the software

If the cost of fixing 2 is less than the value of 1, then you buy the device.

I don't have an iPhone either, but I don't act like people with a different opinion are drooling morons.

Re:Don't buy it

[p0tat03]

The same way you'd buy an HP and throw Ubuntu on it. You like the hardware, but despise the software (or part of it), so you do what you can to change that.

I don't think anyone is going to get through to you though, you've apparently already convinced yourself that the only reason to own an iPhone is for superficial trendy reasons. Personally, I feel that the UI is far superior to any other phone on the market, particularly when compared to similar smartphones that run Windows Mobile. Let's not talk Blackberry, their UI is so woefully behind both WM and iPhone that it's really a bit pathetic.

I jailbreak mine because I like the responsiveness of the OS, I like the UI, I like how many things are taken for granted (the media capabilities out of the box are excellent, as opposed to other smartphones, where they feel grafted on, and do not integrate well with other apps). I also want to run 3rd party software on it, because there's some really good stuff out there.

Re:Don't buy it

[QuantumG]

Awesome, so you're buying a product and deliberately cutting yourself off from software updates for it.

What could possibly go wrong?

Re:Don't buy it

[QuantumG]

So you're literally saying that you would rather be in a jail than face the risks of a free society.

Fuck me, what a great generation.

hrm...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you can't. Unless you have a time machine to get the 3rd generation of it, you have to wait like the rest of us.

I do not think it means what you think it means

[Anonymous Coward]

...and NES.app, a Nintendo game console emulator. In just over a week, open development is finally here for the iPhone 3G!

So one of the first and notable triumphs of this 'open development' ideal we keep hearing about lets you play pirated games.

Rock on, freedom fighters, rock on.

Anonymous Troll

Re:I do not think it means what you think it means

[Koiu Lpoi]

Shit guys, Nintendo is losing potential money over Twenty Year Old games. People are gonna get sued all over the place for this one, goddamn! Piracy of games from 4 console generations ago is really hurting their bottom line.

Also, you might want to talk to the MAME people about what exactly an emulator is for. But, even if you allow yourself to become knowledgeable, don't let it get the way of your trolling!

In before "virtual console sales!" comment completely ignoring the "portability" aspect.

Re:I do not think it means what you think it means

[DavidShor]

They are not as clear cut, but I'd say it still comes out ahead. Copyrights only exist for public benefit, and studies have shown that copyright periods that maximize incentives to produce are drastically lower than copyright periods mandated by law.

Make copyright periods too long, and eventually you have companies like Nintendo re-releasing old games in lieu of actually producing new content.

Re:I do not think it means what you think it means

[BLKMGK]

What, you didn't keep all of your old Nintendo carts? Guess YOU are the one playing the pirated games then. Many of the rest of us still have the carts.

Re:so

[neonmonk]

Flamebait? By pointing out the OpenMoko's obvious downsides to the iPhone? Are you kidding me? The overzealous sensitive mods are out in force!

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of the OpenMoko, but the execution is poor considering the considerable competition. People are developing plenty of apps for the iPhone because it is popular and it does have a very polished user interface. The iPhone has staying power. The OpenMoko? Not so much.

So don't buy one?

[aztektum]

I realize the iPhone has a cool interface and all, but if so many people have a problem with Apple's tactics over this, why buy one?

It's like criticizing the makers of Soylent Green for using people as the ingredients and yet YOU STILL EAT SOYLENT GREEN.

Eh...

[SilentChris]

Not that I don't appreciate the effort, but the App Store has more than held my sway over the old Installer.app-style stuff. Just about everything I want is free on there, and there's really a handful of stuff that will not be on there (emulators, as I'm assuming they count as "illegal" and pr0n -- but who needs pr0n in an app anyway)? So far, the stuff that has come out (e.g. radio apps) and what people are working on (about 5 programmers that I know of are doing VOIP apps -- and Apple already said there'd be no problem putting them up on the store).

I even downloaded the SDK and, yeah, while you can't do anything crazy with kernel or whatever in an "official" program, the API is pretty robust (pretty much any app can call one or two commands to find the GPS location -- that's pretty cool). I'm tempted to write my own apps now.

I mean, yeah, open source is cool and all. But all I wanted was the apps, and 99% of what I want is going to end up on the App store (in some cases for free). I haven't even jailbroken my phone at this point.

I don't want a device I have to "jailbreak"

[syousef]

Honestly, I don't understand why so many intelligent people love the iPhone. From what I understand (and I'm happy to be corrected) here are some of the big drawbacks:

1) Heavily restricted and requires "jailbreak"
2) I read that in Australia at least must be hooked up to iTunes before it can make anything other than emergency calls! WTF????
3) Doesn't play as many different types of media as other devices?
4) Overhyped and overpriced
5) Built in expensive to replace battery.
6) No storage expansion.

It's suppose to be stylish. For some anything that Steve Jobs does is considered stylish. Such is the myth, that the man could start a style trend by being caught scratching his balls in public - within minutes fanboys would be espousing the health benefits of doing it, and deriding anyone who questioned the wisdom or decorum of doing it. Use your brains and quit with the mindless consumerism and hero worship. Function over form. Use your brains or suffer the consequences. Jailbreaking this thing is like buying a stylish little city runabout, then trying to haul a 2 tonne boat with it.

Watch me get modded into oblivion for daring to criticise the thing. C'est la slashdot.

Re:I don't want a device I have to "jailbreak"

[neonmonk]

People pay for style. There are people that spend hundreds of dollars on single items of clothing: "No hood, less pockets than a Kmart jacket. Lame."

At least this has some functionality and is reasonable well designed! Get over it you consumer fascist! =)

Re:I don't want a device I have to "jailbreak"

[Free the Cowards]

Posting on Slashdot must automatically remove all of your ability to sympathize with other human beings too.

Let's go through why most people don't care about the stuff you raised.

1) Most people don't do anything that's restricted anyway. This is less true of being restricted to a single carrier, but people generally have very little loyalty toward an individual carrier.

2) People really do not feel that it's a big deal to connect their phone to their computer one time in the 2+ years that they will own it.

3) People don't have "many different types of media", they have MP3s. The iPhone plays MP3s.

4) $200 US does not seem overpriced to me. As for overhyped, most people don't have this weird reaction where they feel that they are obligated to dislike anything that's popular.

5) Most people simply don't care about replacing their battery.

6) Most people simply don't care about storage expansion.

Your complains are all legitimate and it's fine that you don't like the thing (I don't own one either), but it's silly to act as though the device has no merit whatsoever.

Re:I don't want a device I have to "jailbreak"

[Free the Cowards]

That's fine. That's a reason why you don't like it. It is not, however, a reason why everybody with any sense at all shouldn't like it. There's a big difference, and people on this site have a very difficult time understanding that.

Re:I don't want a device I have to "jailbreak"

[Free the Cowards]

You gave plenty of reasons why you do not want this phone. You gave no reasons why an arbitrary intelligent, reasonable person is obligated not to like this phone.

There is an enormous difference between "I don't like this" and "if you like this then you are stupid", and people on Slashdot simply don't grasp it.

The SDK is not incompatible with the GPL

[larry bagina]

The SDK is XCode and GCC. Neither one cares which license you use. Apple's iPhone app store requires signing, which conflicts withe the GPLv3, but it doesn't prevent using the GPLv2 or other open source licenses and it doesn't prevent you from distributing the code (or binaries).

Other way around

[SuperKendall]

Not buying a great product you can easily crack is even more retarded. If you limit your options only to fully supported models of distribution you'll never have anything. You'll also face a life of being totally ripped off by the people that have you at the mercy of limited options.

The car dealer recommends you change the oil at the dealership, do you do that every tie as well?

We live in the hackers age. Embrace that, and win.

Nothing is wrong with the parallel chain

[SuperKendall]

Are you so apoplectic at people who install the XBox media center, cutting themselves off from official XBox updates?

REAL hackers accept the path of the parallel path they take. In reality there is no risk since you can always cut back to the main branch from Apple if things stop working - but why would they? If things work today they will continue to work as long as the device does.

You are just making excuses for continuance of your irrational Apple hatred.

Re:Nothing is wrong with the parallel chain

[clang_jangle]

There's nothing irrational about hating Apple. They are the kings of the proprietary and I like being in control of my own hardware.

Any hatred is irrational, but Apple does seem quite opposed to Freedom these days, which is a strong reason not to support them. I still use a Mac a lot because I do multimedia production, which unfortunately only the Mac handles well at this time. But I would never buy an iPhone or an iPod, not with the kind of policies Apple lays down for them. It's a shame too, they could be such nice devices otherwise. And you may be sure the minute there is a Linux alternative for serious mm production*, I'll be switching over altogether.

Support the suppliers who are not trying to lock down the hardware.

Yes, that makes a lot of sense to me. But I guess the looks of a gadget are what matters more to a lot of people.

*please don't post to tell me about ardour, audacity, ecasound, etc. They just aren't ready yet, though I certainly applaud their efforts and look forward to the day they are ready.

Re:Nothing is wrong with the parallel chain

[DinDaddy]

There's nothing irrational about hating Apple. ... I still use a Mac a lot because I do multimedia production, which unfortunately only the Mac handles well at this time.

There is nothing irrational about hating the only company that is bothering to market a good solution to your work needs?

Re:Nothing is wrong with the parallel chain

[The End Of Days]

Hatred is always irrational. It doesn't arise from reason, it arises from emotion.

I personally save my emotion for people. Spending it on companies and computers seems like a horrible waste to me.

Re:Nothing is wrong with the parallel chain

[maztuhblastah]

I may well get modded down to the depths of hell for this, but I've got karma to burn:

I would never buy an iPhone or an iPod, not with the kind of policies Apple lays down for them.

What policies?

I own an iPod. I have never, nor will I ever pay money for a track from the iTunes Music Store. Instead, my iPod is loaded with MP3s (ripped with cdparanoia and encoded with LAME) and AACs (again, ripped and encoded using OSS.)

Apple has done nothing to prevent me from using portable, cross platform formats on my iPod.

Now as to the iPhone -- you have more of a case here, but (at least in the US), not much of one. In order to release a cellphone in the US, you need the support of the carriers. If you don't have the support of the carriers... well... how's Openmoko doing again? In order to appease AT&T, Apple needed to make concessions (just as it had to make concessions with iTMS to appease the labels.) One of these concessions was control over the software that could be run on the device. AT&T doesn't want people using things like VoIP apps and SMS->email gateways. Apple needs AT&T's support, so it restricts the applications that can run on the device. It's as simple as that. It would make excellent business sense for Apple to support as much software as possible, but it wouldn't make very good business sense to piss off AT&T (thereby nixing the iPhone's chances of a US release.)

Look, I'm not happy about it either. I'd like to be able to install Java, Python, etc. on the iPhone through the app store. But given that the choice seems to be a somewhat restricted cellphone (that still performs admirably at its primary task as... well... a cellphone) or no Apple phone at all, I'd pick the former.

Apple does seem quite opposed to Freedom these days

Thing is, the rest of Apple's business doesn't seem to be nearly as controlling as you make it out to be. A large chunk of Mac OS X is open source, and Apple has donated code to the community even when it wasn't required for legal reasons (mDNSResponder, for example.) Apple's also donated a tremendous amount of manpower to the open source community: WebKit, LLVM, and gcc have all benefited from Apple's engineering staff. Take WebKit for example. Apple could have simply rolled KHTML into their browser, taken the patches from KHTML when they became available, and not done any work on their own. That would have been "good enough." But they didn't do that. Instead, albeit after a rocky start, they put a programmer (Dave Hyatt) on WebKit development full-time, opened the full source tree for public access, and turned WebKit into the best open source rendering engine out there.

Open standards run deep in Apple's desktop software. plist files are XML based, Mac OS X has system-wide support for PDF -- even iTunes (that "monopolistic" music player) rips files into a interchangeable format by default (AAC.) Apple has embraced H.264 for their video efforts (compare and contrast to if they had developed their own, proprietary codec.)

We'd all like a company that produces a completely open source OS that actively pushes its users towards using completely open formats like ODF with no option to use anything proprietary. We'd love it if this company made easy-to-use, stylish products built completely out of open components. I think I speak for all of /. when I say that if such a company existed and gained even half of Apple's popularity, we'd become fanatical supporters.

But in reality, such a company hasn't come along. The open source community (at least if past efforts are anything to go by) sucks when it comes to competing with Apple and Microsoft. The Openmoko FreeRunner, the open source community's answer to the iPhone, is an embarrassingly outdated usability nightmare. The OSS community _still_ has yet to make a music player as easy-to-use for the common consumer as the iPod.

We can all rant and rave abou

Re:It's tied to a 2 year high cost lock in.

[Free the Cowards]

So is almost every other phone that people buy.

Once again, this is only a reason why you don't want it. It's not a reason why nobody should want it.

Re:Still no SSH client..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the license agreement, there is no restriction against a terminal type application.

It's just that no one has bothered to write one.

Re:This "incompatible with FOSS" FUD is annoying

[bnenning]

Get on with the news, zealots: the final SDK has been released July 11, so the NDA has been lifted for more than a week now.

You'd think so, but no. If you check Apple's Cocoa mailing lists you'll see multiple nastygrams from the moderators stating that the iPhone SDK is still under NDA. It's an exceptionally stupid situation where anybody in the world can download the SDK, but nobody can talk about it, and presumably publicly posting code that uses it would be in violation.

WOW. I mean wow.

[robogobo]

I really can't believe the shortsightedness and creativity bashing going on here. The first post genuinely poses the question, "why?" and not only does nobody present a valid answer, but most take the opportunity to jump to hacker bashing and fanboyism. Doesn't anyone see the real value of taking stuff apart to see how it works, modding it to work better or differently, or just messing around with what seems to be the future?

I unlocked and jailbreaked my iPhone primarily so i could use it with local prepaid sims while travelling. I spend months out of the country (US), and AT&T just doesn't cater to folks like me. But coming from a Palm platform, I loved the ability for people to write whatever app they wanted and get inside the os. This is where the real creativity comes from that gives us real world solutions made for and by the users. I don't think buying into the prescribed contractual setup is the best way to fit such a powerful device into one's life. And those of you who do, great, fine. But don't bash those who want to tweak and crack their stuff. You don't realize how much of their work and discovery has evolved into what you consider the established norm.

To me you guys are condemning the very revolutionaries who gave you the freedom and luxury you have today.

Re:Your usage patterns

[StarKruzr]

my main box can do anything your iphone can via cli

Sure it can. However, it cannot ALSO take photographs, use WWAN broadband, send/receive text messages, etc. It is the convergence between these things that is useful and interesting.

Using the phone as a terminal is precisely what I do -- along with other things.