The situation with jailbreak tools for Apple’s iOS has always resembled a game of cat and mouse, where jailbreak developers are usually fast to develop an answer to Apple’s newest protections, ultimately keeping the operating system open with every update. However, recent developments in iOS 10 have made it more and more difficult to get around the protections that Apple puts in place, and reports about the current state of the operating system are still not positive.
Indeed, it looks like Apple have finally figured out a reliable way to prevent jailbreaks, at least for now. It’s entirely possible that this protection will also get broken sometime later, but at the moment, there have been various discouraging reports coming in from the jailbreak scene.
Most of the main teams are reportedly giving up for now, and users will have to hope that the next major version of iOS comes with some new security holes that would make it possible to break it open again. Otherwise, they will either have to stick to a lower version or move away from jailbreaking their phones altogether.
The latter is not a positive perspective for jailbreak users at all, but the situation might eventually come to that, looking at the current trends. There are many benefits to jailbreaking one’s iOS device that have drawn in users for a long time, and it can indeed be quite challenging to go back to using the “vanilla” operating system after getting used to those features.
Critics have argued that Apple should at least offer some replacement for the most commonly used jailbreak features if they’re so adamant to make the procedure impossible. The company has done this in the past occasionally, but it’s not a common trend. They also don’t coordinate that with their community in any way, and changes introduced in this manner tend to be picked seemingly at random.
On the other hand, malicious hackers have started to take advantage of the situation, releasing viruses and other dangerous software posing as jailbreak tools for iOS 10.2. We’ve seen various reports of users being targeted in this manner, so those looking for a jailbreak solution for their devices should be alert and always verify the source of the tool.
The unofficial nature of iOS jailbreaks means that it can be very hard to verify the legitimacy of those tools in the first place though, and that’s precisely the fact that those hackers are exploiting at the moment.
Unfortunately, these developments also serve to undermine the position of the jailbreak community, giving further credibility to Apple in their claims that jailbreaking is bad and should be prevented. Hopefully there is going to be some acceptable middle ground in the future, because it looks like the community is getting more and more divided over the issue.
Apple themselves are of course completely quiet at the moment, and they’ve refused to make any official comments about their plans regarding jailbreaking. Of course, knowing the company’s actions in the past, it’s pretty easy to guess what they might intend to do.
One of the most commonly requested compromises from the community is for Apple to allow users to modify the operating system through some official channel, possibly open sourcing it or something along those lines. Additionally, the company could potentially give their users a possibility to manually load custom applications to their devices, one of the main reasons for people to go with a jailbroken version of the system in the first place.