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Windows Phone Unlock Tool Goes Official
judgecorp writes "A tool to unlock (or 'jailbreak' if you like) Windows Phone devices is now available with Microsoft's blessing. ChevronWP7 Labs was withdrawn at Microsoft's request a year ago, but is back now, allowing users to run any app on their phones for a cost of $9."
But Microsoft withdrew it a year ago.
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It's sad when Microsoft is more forward thinking than Apple isn't it.
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I would not have expected this sort of news from Microsoft a decade ago. Then again, maybe we are getting too used to Apple.
I think this is a nice move by MS :)
You pay the $9 to run your own apps on the phone, right. But only atmost 5 of them. Yes, there is a limit on the number of apps you are allowed to run on your very own phone. And you have to pay for that. Pathetic.
1) App market works just like before
2) The $9 price tag isn't from Microsoft, it's from the guy who made the unlocker. He is selling it.
Rafael Rivera generally tends to hold a good deal of trust and clout amongst Windows enthusiasts (shock and awe that there's such a crowd, I know) in that he's known specifically for thoroughly investigating a product. He always produces a high quality service, product, workaround, etc. for whatever his project happens to be, and has provided many of the safe patches that unlock hidden functionality during previous Windows alpha and beta releases.
His involvement in this project and in other general Windows reverse-engineering gigs in the past leads me to believe that ChevronWP7 is a solid and safe release. The fact that Microsoft endorsed this is not at all a surprise.
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Without threat of him being shut down by microsoft, and presumably if they're sanctioning it there's some trick on the corporate side or something. They can probably sell a US government version where the unlocker won't work or things along those lines.
You would not have expected Microsoft a decade ago to release an open operating system while Apple released a vertically integrated and closed down market?
Microsoft is many things, but bending over backwards to let anything run on their systems (including malware) has been one of the greatest strengths and weaknesses since the beginning.
Microsoft has never been the direction apple is. While shutting out competition was always a strong stance of theirs. Preventing competition from running on their OS or any devices they run has never been a high priority. I do have to admit, Xbox is probably the most independent developer friendly console (out of the top 3 competitors of course), Microsoft has never attempted to discourage people from using any software on windows. That is kinda how MS kicked apples ass back in the day. (Macs were strongly against allowing competition to design hardware, Microsoft encoraged a huge compeating pricewar to drive down hardware prices and boost software sales.)
Unfortunately, there's a barrier in Mango (whether you use the marketplace developer account dev-unlock, which has been available from day 1, or ChevronWP7 Labs which is essentially the same thing from the phone's perspective) that prevents apps from getting high-permission access (specificlaly, prevents opening a handle on a driver, which is the standard way to break out of the low-privilege app sandbox on WP7). To do this, an app needs to specify the "INTEROPSERVICES" capability in its manifest, and by default Mango blocks installing or running non-marketplace apps with this capability. NoDo and below did not - that's how people were able to do file browsers, registry editors, tethering apps, and so forth - but this restriction is part of Mango.
You can still run some homebrew apps, including native code, but only with low permissions. While it's useful to know there's limits on what an app can do, I'd really like to be able to remove those limits on apps I trust. A webserver that demonstrates access to the full socket API, including TCP server sockets (the official API only has client sockets) is cool, but there's a lot more that you could do.
Fortunately, there's a way around this restiction also built into the OS. The process of removing this restriction is called "interop-unlock" by the guys who discovered it, and is possible easily on LG phones (change the MaxUnsignedApp registry value to 300 or more using the built-in registry editor), possible on Samsung phones (instructions and app here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1271963), and difficult if possible at all on HTC phones (requires rolling back to pre-Mango, which isn't possible on new devices). No solution at all for Dell, Toshiba, or Nokia yet.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
This isn't an "open" system by any stretch of the imagination. It's basically charging people $9 for the ability to sideload software, something Android enables via a checkbox. The security systems remain 100% in force.
I'd be impressed if it put the user in control of the security systems, rather than let Microsoft retain that control (oh, and if it were free and not $9.)