Apple are still fighting hard against the jailbreak scene, and it doesn’t look like the company is planning to give up the battle anytime soon. They have made their position clear, and we’re definitely not going to see any official support or endorsement for jailbreaking. And as if anyone was doubting them, they’ve recently released a small update for iOS, bringing it up to version 9.3.4, which closes a commonly used loophole which made jailbreaking possible.
Of course, this won’t block jailbreaking forever, it just returns the ball in the jailbreakers’ court, who will now have to find another way to circumvent the restrictions of the operating system and unlock its full capabilities. Historically, we haven’t really seen Apple being successful in trying to completely block jailbreak tools, so we don’t expect that the current fix will last for a long time.
But it’s still a frustrating situation for users, needless to say – and what makes it worse for some is the fact that the update apparently lacked any other purpose than to block jailbreaking. It looks like Apple are still putting serious effort into making the process as difficult as possible, but of course we’ll eventually have a tool that utilizes a new hole in the OS.
Some publications are even advising users against downloading the new update if they are concerned about the possibility to unlock their devices in the future. It’s possible to skip it for now, but Apple could always push it out with a major required update down the line. So in the end, blocking the update is more of a temporary Band-Aid rather than a long-term solution.
This has been a common situation for quite a while now, and users who like to jailbreak their iOS devices are now more or less used to the idea that they should avoid downloading certain versions of the system until they’re “clear”. Sometimes, this has taken a long time, but in other cases jailbreaking teams like Pangu have been quick to find an alternative solution.
There are still lots of people actively working to ensure that iOS devices can be jailbroken, and an accordingly large number of users who are interested in their work and are always waiting for the next version of the jailbreak tools to roll out.
According to some, this huge amount of interest should have been motivating enough for Apple to consider making jailbreak tools a publicly available option supported by them, but so far the company has been reluctant to do that and they have been actively pushing against the idea. There have been a few cases where it seemed like they have a good point by doing that too, as we’ve seen various incidents where people’s devices have been compromised by malware that got in through jailbreak tools.
That’s always a risk when doing something like this, of course. Even Android users who are “rooting” their devices have to deal with the same issue occasionally, but Apple are being targeted much more actively by malware developers due to the popularity of their iOS devices. Some claim that this makes the company’s stance on the situation understandable, and it’s reasonable of them to want to protect their users by preventing them from harming themselves. But the majority still hold the opinion that Apple are causing more harm to their community by preventing them from having full access to their devices.