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.

Comments

Don't make counter-factual statements.

[Demena]

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.

Re:Property

[keith_nt4]

You're forgetting one minor detail: post-purchase support. With the iPhone locked down to be one specific way consistently it's much, much easier to support. Less time per support call means more calls-per-hour and fewer over all calls. Support just eats into profits, doesn't make the company any money ya see. So anything Apple can do (from their point of view) to decrease number of calls is a win for them.

I can only imagine what it must be like trying to support an Android OS. All those launchers, different versions of the Settings screen, different UI mods. And that's without rooting it. Sounds like a nightmare.