Jailbreak is loved by many iPhone and iPad users, but for Apple it’s an ongoing love/hate relationship.
When you jailbreak your iOS device, you unlock Apple’s set of restrictions and allow you to do all sorts of things Apple wouldn’t normally allow you to do on an iPhone or iPad. It’s not illegal at all, but the Cupertino-based company likes to have control over the devices and how you use them. Jailbreaking…well…it breaks it.
After jailbreaking, iPhone and iPad owners can do all sorts of things with their device, such as customizing the look and feel of iOS and installing various tweaks to add new features and even get rid of some of the iOS annoyances.
Yes, jailbreak can be used for unethical purposes, but this is really trivial knowledge of what jailbreak really is and what it can do.
In fact, jailbreaking iOS 9 has been pretty awesome, where older iPhone users can get features of newer devices like the iPhone 6s. The new device comes with a 3D Touch screen and some special camera features that let you do all sorts of neat things in iOS 9, but a handful of tweaks have been released that allow jailbreakers to emulate these features on older iPhones.
It’s not surprising that people think Apple isn’t being very kind to jailbreak, and you’re right, but it’s no surprise that Apple secretly enjoys jailbreaking because it gives them loads of ideas to apply to future versions of iOS.
Both iOS 8 and iOS 9 came with a host of new features that originally started as jailbreak tweaks. For example, iOS 8 turned on Quick Reply, QuickType, support for third-party keyboards, and third-party access to Touch ID; these are all made available to pre-jailbreakers.
In iOS 9, Apple introduced an easier way to move it around by swiping the text cursor, showing lowercase letters on the keyboard, jailbreaking in Picture-in-Picture Mode, Split View multitasking, and Low Power Mode (you guessed it). It was tweaked long before iOS 9 was announced.
Sure, you could say some of these features Apple took from Android, but there are a lot of great iOS features that originally started as jailbreak tweaks, which means Apple is definitely paying close attention to what’s going on in the jailbreak world.
There’s no doubt that Apple has made notes on all the great jailbreak tweaks that have been released, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple’s research and development department was stocked with jailbroken iPhones to try out various jailbreak tweaks to see if anything works out. It’s great that it can be integrated into iOS by default.
But at the same time, Apple needs to do its job and fix jailbreak vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. When a jailbreaker discovers an iOS exploit that allows them to jailbreak their iPhone, it’s actually a security risk. If Apple didn’t fix this, it would be in big trouble ethically.
Also, as noted by Apple, jailbreak “can cause security vulnerabilities, instability, reduced battery life, and other issues” in a support document. If Apple didn’t fix the jailbreaks, users would blame the company for the instability of their iPhone as Apple didn’t take the initiative to shut down the exploits.
It definitely puts Apple in a difficult position. On the one hand, jailbreak opens up a whole new world of ideas for Apple to ponder and could really make iOS better in the future, but on the other hand, it’s Apple’s job to patch jailbreak vulnerabilities to eliminate all vulnerabilities and exploits. they agree.
