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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.
Well, of course. Using that narrow definition of "purpose", the purpose of every commercial product is to generate income for the company that is manufacturing and selling that product; any desirable functionality of the product is only a means toward that end.
That's a true observation, but also an obvious and unremarkable one, except to anyone who was under the impression that corporations were a type of public-service-oriented nonprofit.
What's relevant is whether or not the product serves the customer's needs well, or not.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
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.
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.
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.
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
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.
Apart from the fact Samsung don't own the Google Play store.
And the even bigger fact you can install anything you want on your Android from any store you like, or even no store at all.