Ever since the Apple iPhone released back in 2007, the cat & mouse game between hackers and Apple began. While Apple believed in controlling the entire ecosystem around the iPhone and being a firewall to any 3rd party application, feature or functionality to be built had to go through a touch process (read: Apple’s acid test). Add to that the fact that, iPhone happens to be locked to AT&T since three years and international launches are often delayed with endless carrier negotiations, the wonderful thing called jailbreak brought cheer to the community with an adoption rate reported as high as 9%, the hackers have surely hit Apple hard enough here.
Be custom ringtones or themes, 3rd party apps or pirated ones – Jailbreakers have opened the door for you. The recent baseband upgrade out with the firmware version 3.1.3 is yet to be hacked completely and this has left the community with only the tethered jailbreak as an option. In case you aren’t aware, if your iPhone is on tethered jailbreak, it would reboot to a activation screen everything it runs out of a charge or you poweroff the device. You need to connect the same to the system again and jailbreak again to start using the iPhone. A lengthy and irritating process.
While it was expected that a turnaround to this would come up very soon and hackers would catchup with the Apple software update, I am surprised to see more than one hardware solutions coming up to tackle the situation. We recently saw the iDongle that allows you to re-jailbreak the iPhone (or iPad touch) if you end up rebooting to the activation / recovery screen. Today I came across something called iKey that does exactly the same thing as iDongle.
The opportunity that hackers / modders see in jailbreaking solutions for the iPhone / iPod touch or iPad is certainly a testimony to Apple’s popularity and success with the iPhone platform. Anytime in the future if I am to gaze the popularity of a platform (be it Android or WebOS), all I need to do is look at the hackers community!
