„The Life, Death, and Legacy of iPhone Jailbreaking“

For Freeman, the father of Cydia, a man who’s seen countless jailbreaks, it’s basically all over. Back in the good old days, he says, jailbreaks would work for months. Now, when there are public jailbreaks, they get killed immediately.

”Apple has both upped priority on fixing jailbreaks but also we have moved so far up the stack that we’re actually dangerous,“ he says.

Once a jailbreak crusader, it’s gotten to the point where Freeman no longer recommends that people jailbreak their phones. It’s dangerous, due to the higher risk of getting hacked, and it’s not even worth it anymore, he says in a recent phone call.

”What do you get in the end?“ he asks. „It used to be that you got killer features that almost were the reason you owned the phone. And now you get a small minor modification.“

“That turns into, like, a death spiral, where when you get fewer people bothering to jailbreak you get fewer developers targeting interesting things, which means there’s less reasons for people to jailbreak,“ he added. „Which means there’s fewer people jailbreaking, which causes there to be less developers bothering to target it. And then you slowly die.“

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai | Brian Merchant | motherboard.vice.com

„Er ist tot, Jim!“

(Urlaubsziele: „The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone“ von Brian Merchant (14.99 €). Sein kürzlich veröffentlichtes Buch hat zum verlinkten Artikel beigetragen.)