“For several years, it was common practice among iOS enthusiasts to ‘jailbreak’ their iPhones so they could enable additional functionality like screen recording and widget support,” Abhimanyu Ghoshal reports for TNW.
Jailbreaking was “once fueled by an active worldwide community with numerous crafty programmers who figured out how to bypass Apple’s device protections,” Ghoshal reports. “And with the closing of two major repositories on the Cydia alternative app store this month, the death knell for jailbreaking is ringing clear.”
“There hasn’t been a jailbreak for iOS 11 so far, even though it’s been months since it was released to the public,” Ghoshal reports. “There are no longer as many benefits to using cracked versions of iOS, and the one major draw lately was being able to install apps, themes and tweaks from Cydia. Now, with the ModMyi and ZodTTD/MacCiti repositories having shut down on the popular app store, there’ll be even fewer files available to fans.”
Read more in the full article here.
“Beginning shortly after the first iPhone was launched, and picking up steam in 2008, jailbreaking was a full-blown cultural and economic phenomenon. Hacking crews known by names such as the iPhone Dev Team, Chronic Dev, and evad3rs were some of the best iPhone hackers of their generation.,” Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Brian Merchant write for Motherboard. “They made both sport and crusade of breaking into Apple’s ascendant phone and opening the system up to rogue developers. A brilliant, iconoclastic software engineer named Jay Freeman gave venue to the hackers and developers by building Cydia, a sort of alternative App Store. At its height, Cydia, which predated the actual App Store, was a business pulling in millions of dollars in revenue, and offered users a way to experience the iPhone as a truly free and open computer.”
“Things, however, have changed,” Franceschi-Bicchierai and Merchant write. “The jailbreaking community is fractured, with many of its former members having joined private security firms or Apple itself. The few people still doing it privately are able to hold out for big payouts for finding iPhone vulnerabilities. And users themselves have stopped demanding jailbreaks, because Apple simply took jailbreakers’ best ideas and implemented them into iOS.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Somewhere along the way, give Apple’s rapid advancements to iOS, jailbreaking became more trouble than it was worth.