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The Life, Death, and Legacy of iPhone Jailbreaking (vice.com)
From a Motherboard article: Jailbreaking is the art of hacking into Apple's ultra-secure iOS operating system and unlocking it -- and thus allowing users to customize the phone, and write or install any software unimpeded by Apple's restrictions. At the time I met with Todesco (a person who offered jailbreaking service), in December 2016, there was no known jailbreak (for the iPhone 7) -- no public knowledge of this hack -- for the latest iOS version that was installed on my iPhone (iOS 10.2). The world's first jailbreaking step-by-step procedure, discovered in 2007, was posted online for all to see. Subsequent jailbreaks were used by millions of people. At one point, there was even a website -- called jailbreakme.com -- that was free for all to use and jailbroke your phone simply by visiting it. [...] Ten years after the iPhone hit the sleek tables of Apple Stores worldwide, and the first-ever jailbreak, that Wild West is gone. There's now a professionalized, multi-million dollar industry of iPhone security research. It's a world where jailbreaking itself -- at least jailbreaking as we've come to know it -- might be over.
If you have to have the manufacturer's permission to alter something you own, do you really own it?
:-) Always do love a challenge. But if all this 'new' security benefits the user as much as the company, it's all good
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I should have attributed that quote to Donald J. Trump, the soon to be impeached president of the USA.
I wish iOS had an advanced mode you could enable. Take down the "walls" and let me run ssh to customize things to my liking.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Well we already impeached a Clinton, so impeach Don and watch it mean even less to him.
:))))
Apple has no restrictions on source code. Just download the development kit and compile your own apps from source. Always been that way. Apple is only a walled garden to people who cannot program for themselves.
Jailbreaking the iphone back in the day, like my 3GS, it made sense.
Why the heck did Apple decide you could only have a black background anyway? And only three text tones? No hiding iconseither. It wasn't like they sold background apps or SMS tones for a fee, they just said "no, not your phone."
It's obsolete now because... you can just get an android. And apple decided to give users some control over things like the background.
Jailbreaking, both for Android and iOS, came to be and became popular because it enable several things users were asking for and either the OSs couldn't do it, didn't want you to do, or just simply weren't high enough in the list of priorities for the companies.
Time passed and a whole ton of features, functionalities and customization options that came first from the jailbreak community were adopted and sometimes appropriated by the official OSs. So it's not only because security has hardened on iOS or Android, but more because these days there are not many people needing extra features that a jailbreak would enable.
How branding went through all these years also helped to estabilish proper markets I guess... Hardware is pretty much the same these days for Android phones and iPhones, and it's plenty estabilished that people who wants to be tinkering with their phones going beyond mainstream capabilities will flock towards Android anyways, so it just doesn't make that much sense for someone who intends to mess and customize their phones to the limits would get an iPhone for it anymore.
Why would you have attributed my post to someone else?
- Rob 'CuckmdrTaco' Malda
The summary is embarrassing. There's no organization or transition from sentence to sentence, you could arrange them in any order and it wouldn't sound any better or worse.
Apple ... just works. It makes calls and runs popular apps. And nothing else.
Funny how history repeats itself - Android is the new IBM PCs, while early iphone was the Apple II - last apple open to tinkering, if in somewhat awkward fashion.
In short, Android displaced iPhone in the tinkerer market niche, and the decline of jailbreaking strongly correlates with android eating up Apple's market. The article, oddly, doesn't make any mention of this.
| iOS is one of the—if not the—most secure and tough to hack operating system in the world.
Stopped reading here
Let me remove apps I never use. Facebook, snapchat, dropbox et all, I'm looking at you. I don't have infinite storage on my phone, and as Android now encrypts SDCC cards it's not easy to upgrade said card.
20 years ago we called this crap shovelware, and when we bought a new PC we spent a few hours looking at everything pre-installed, trying to figure out if we needed/wanted it (pre google), and deleting the ones we didn't want. Had a vendor back then been stupid enough to disallow you to remove this crap the outcry would have been amazing, and the vendor would be out of business in 6 months.
Android can do anything that iOS does, but the same flexibility of a jailbreak can be had out of the box. So why even look at the iPhone?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Apple implemented all the features that previously made jailbreaking worthwhile.
Jailbreaking is the art of hacking into Apple's ultra-secure iOS operating system and unlocking it.
VS
there was even a website -- called jailbreakme.com -- that was free for all to use and jailbroke your phone simply by visiting it.
One of these must be wrong...
here is plenty of choice in the market still, since you have OnePlus and Google allowing you to easily unlock your phone and flash whatever rom you want
Not if you count the restrictions arbitrarily enforced by Google through their "Compatibility" Test Suite.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
There is an app for that.
it's practically a social network; and one you only get with an iPhone. Android's never managed to come up with anything like it. I think mostly because the various handset manufacturers all wanted to do it themselves. You need a single standard for that.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I think there's a been a bit of a change, reducing the more obvious reasons why root & jailbreak is useful:
1) Root brought us a lot of innovation over the years (night screen, swipe keyboards, permissions... etc). It took Apple a long time to implement some of these, but they have now. When we were rooting before we never thought the likes of Apple and Google would actually help us with app permissions.
2) Root extends the life of your phone considerably. Even if you're an iphone7+ user this affects you. You probably remember selling your iPhone#, getting a good price... this probably led you to think Apple is good quality since it's held value well.... and that influenced your decision. The thing is, Jailbreak had a market price influence on that because having control allows you to continue using your phone. I think that effect is less now because: ...Why not move to a honest subscription model and phone companies pay for recycling instead of full subsidy motivation to create e-waste.
- apps are getting more and more bloated
- more client side processing: websites are requesting more and more processing power
- hardware like fingerprint readers getting forced down our throats
- increased convergence
I'm hoping that if Jailbreak and root becomes impossible, that this creates enough of a market gap for something to stand in it's place.
A blog I run for the wealth
Then get an Android device instead of an overpriced Apple.
You don't need to jailbreak anymore, but we do need more developers for this new method. You find an app in ipa format, connect your phone to your computer, drag and drop the ipa to the Impactor, and sign in to your Apple username and pass. Impactor takes care of everything else. It's even available for Linux.
With Android you can have your choice of spell checks.
iSlam
-I wish iOS had an advanced mode you could enable.
You mean like Palm/HP webOS's developer mode ? (type in the command "webOS2009060" in universal seach. Or for shit and giggles, you can also spell out literally the Konami code "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart", but it's a bit longer to type) (Also the default remote-shell is a bit shitty ("novacom" - some adb-like thingy) buy you can install openssh)
You mean like Jolla Sailfish OS developer mode ? (check in the "developer mode" box in the settings, it will even automatically download ssh for you).
You mean like several android tablet that allow fastboot unlocking ? (again adb shell sucks, but I hear that drop bear is installable)
You mean like the ancient OpenMoko FreeRunner (most system image come with ssh preinstalled)
You mean like most other full GNU/Linux running phone ?
Yep. Apple is the definite oddball here.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]