Not sure about others but it’s been many years since I felt the need to jailbreak my iOS devices. One of the reasons is that there’s just no “killer apps” available for me by jailbreaking anymore, iOS generally does 100% of what I want it to do, and the way I like it to do it.
There are so many little things that just piss me off to no end when I'm on a non-Jailbroken iPhone.
• Google search results lead to AMP pages. When Jailbroken, I can load a userscript that turns this off.
• Random apps have stupid names on my homescreen. Either the name is in all caps, or it's too long and Apple puts a big ellipses in the middle. I can't rename them unless I'm Jailbroken.
• Stock iOS has two separate low-battery alerts, the first of which occurs when there's still a fifth of my battery left! I'm well aware of the red icon at the top of my screen.
• The stock iOS keyboard has a dictation key I always hit accidentally. I can disable it when I'm Jailbroken.
There are many, many, many more examples, these are just off the top of my head. It's been long enough since I set up my Jailbreak that I don't actually remember most of them, but I use a ton of let's-call-them annoyance fixers, and I don't think I could live without them.
>>> The stock iOS keyboard has a dictation key I always hit accidentally. I can disable it when I'm Jailbroken
General > Keyboard > Enable Dictation and then disable dictation.
The microphone on the keyboard disappears.
I agree, there are a few little things that are annoying. And I wish iOS was more like Linux, in that you could just change anything if you actually cared to. But personally I rarely run into these edge cases on iOS these days. In the early days jailbreak was mandatory.
Dictation is still there, or voice recording? I turned off dictation, but can still record voice memos or texts.
Aside: I find the concept of a voice "text" amusing and somewhat redundant with voicemail, though I can see an argument that the use cases are slightly different.
the microphone icon on bottom right. pressing it asks to enable dictation. on bottom left is emoji picker. huge spacing on both, what a stupid waste of precious vertical space
That doesn't hide the keyboard's microphone. While technically dictation is disabled, hitting the microphone asks you if you want to "enable it", or "not now". I need a "never ask me again" option.
I don't have an iDevice so I can't check, but you have to enter a menu entitled 'Enable Dictation' in order to remove the speech-to-text button from the keyboard?
No, the circle is not complete until an article is posted about how a 15 year old cobbled together a website/app combo that did it automatically and grew to a few million users overnight; Apple hired the kid, killed the app, and wrote a new layer of signed security into iOS that would prevent anything like that from working again; and that layer was responsible for the last iCloud outage because somebody at Apple accidentally let a certificate expire.
Is there some trick to make file.pizza work? I'm leaving the tab open and trying on various different devices, but it just stays at Peers: 0 and nothing downloads.
While I do have WebRTC blocking on this computer, I tried sharing from other devices and networks too, chrome and firefox and mobile versions. According to [1]&[2] WebRTC UDP and TCP are enabled, relay/reflexive/host connectivity.
Does that compete at all speed-wise with just plugging it into your computer via USB? I guess your local network should be fairly fast, but I would think that USB would still be faster (not to mention that you wouldn't need to find the right file from the terminal).
Even with SMB, it is very painful to use - you can't create bookmarks and if a connectivity test fails to the server - it gets removed from the list and you have to add it back again.
Not sure but I think moving files within the same share also takes a round-trip to the iPhone.
I'm still not sure why we didn't get a normal file browser from the start. It is a solved problem and everything rolled out for ios has been a regression.
I have like 80 desktop Firefox extensions on for various privacy measures and helpful utilities. The fact that you can't even install Firefox let alone all these useful extensions is a big reason why I'm now on Android instead.
That's it, it's not so much the "killer apps" anymore but the little things that you can fix up.
The one downside to jailbreaking which I never found a working solution for was numerous apps that had jailbreak detection which caused the app to stop working, like Pokemon Go.
Theres an app you can install that fakes the data to the apps and they will all run. Including banking apps. The other app thats great to use with that are gps spoofing apps.
> 1. Google search results lead to AMP pages. When Jailbroken, I can load a userscript that turns this off.
change your search engine?
(my setup on all devices: ddg, and when results suck, i try google by adding "!g" to the search. It open my eyes when i see both suck for a few terms, but when using google i don't question the engine)
Thanks, but then I'd have to prepend all my queries with that. And sure, maybe not all queries need it, but I don't want to have to search two times either. I just want good results on the first try.
I appreciate everyone who uses DDG, and perhaps that's the route I would go if I couldn't use my userscript. But I greatly prefer my setup.
DDG as a search engine really does suck, but as a ui for other engines it's excellent. I like it on my phone in particular because I can pull things up faster and save data by not going to multiple pages for specific searches. Examples:
!s - start page, a google proxy
!yt - youtube search
!w - wikipedia
etc.
Almost all I use I just figured out because it's obvious. !az = amazon, !ebay = ebay, etc. Usually just guessing gets me there 90% of the time, and then I can learn to use it again.
But again, that's just my workflow, not for everyone if you don't care if you use google for 99% of your searches.
You don’t, only for free text type searches. A majority of my searches are other !foo searches, like !w Napoleon to find wiki info on the topic, same for YouTube, Python docs, different dictionaries and thesauruses. You learn to use these, just like you learn to use any other tool.
It depends on how you use it. Whenever Google gets my search wrong I usually end up clicking a bunch of results anyway, cause even though they're not what I was looking for there's a good chance they still look interesting. But then when I try to fix my search to get to what I'm actually looking for Google just spams me with more results related to the links I clicked :(
Its not a solution for Safari, but if you use Firefox (which you can now finally set as your default browser) you can add new search engines like Startpage and use them as the default.
> Stock iOS has two separate low-battery alerts, the first of which occurs when there's still a fifth of my battery left!
Recharging after the first 20% alert might significantly prolong the useful lifetime of your battery. Li-Po cell can provide a couple thousand 80%-20% cycles, but only less than a thousand 100%-0% cycles because working at the ends of the capacity range degrades the battery faster.
It's a fair point. But for me on my iPhone 6S, I've found that last 20% to be the difference between a phone that gets me through the day, and one that does not.
I get my battery replaced yearly. I would upgrade to a newer phone instead, but I value my headphone jack too much.
Apple's dictation is so accurate 80% of the time I send replies to messages on my Apple Watch (unless they are long or detailed) and 90% of that time I never, ever have to make a correction. It's something that sold me on the watch.
This is another problem I have with stock iOS—third party keyboards randomly revert back to the Apple keyboard on password entry screens!
I 100% understand why Apple does this, but a keyboard that randomly changes to a different keyboard under some circumstances is completely unusable to me. My brain needs consistency.
When I did jailbreak, it was never about apps and rarely about high-level features (I did use NC settings before that was an official thing, and I installed a torrent client and some emulators, I think).
I jailbroke because I wanted to have access to a local terminal and write and execute arbitrary code on the phone - nothing major, mostly small bash and Python scripts and some C code when I was learning how to program.
It was also a philosophical thing: I want to have full ownership over my phone, whether I need that on a day-to-day basis or not.
I moved to Android when iOS jailbreaks started to become rarer and slower to appear, and more and more jailbreaks started to be tethered-only. There are only so many hoops I am willing to jump through when I can instead buy an Android phone that officially supports unlocking the bootloader and rooting it.
Same here. I jail broke the first iphone to use it as a handle held video camera.
I need to jailbreak to get music off it. Lost the orginal itune laptop hard drive where the music is on. Don't want to install some no free iMyPHone type of software to do the extract, don't want to run them on my computer, seems a bit fishy. I really just need root access and then I can scp off the music.
I did this at one point as well but now I prefer not to have root access for security reasons. I'd rather have the ability to remote into a user with limited privileges on a more secure server, given how big of a target mobile devices are. That and it turned out I had no real practical reason to be fiddling with most of my devices -- I mostly work on server & web code, anything outside that the closer it is to 0 configuration the better it is for my sanity.
Android just has a working terminal without bypassing anything. You can enable one in developer options or just install a third porty terminal like termux.
Android and iOS are really not equivalent here. Similarly you can install apps from outside the play store normally. No root, no unlocked bootloader, no funny business. Just a big difference in how each OS treats its users.
You can also install a third party terminal in iOS, in fact the development options for coding on the go on iOS are much more mature than then hacky versions available on Android.
Also termux is going to be a thing of the past, because its developers refuse to use the newer Java based APIs in recent Android versions, as Google is closing down the API space available to the NDK, as means to close down on security exploits.
As an Android user having to help family members with their i devices from time to time, iOS devices frustrate me to no end.
iOS might have a good user experience if you're already used to it. But as someone who is not familiar with it, but uses it from time to time, I find it an horrible experience.
Interesting. My whole family is on iPhone and I remember that my mother had an Android phones years ago (Samsung), and she never fully understood it. Nowadays I have no "support cases".
We originally chose iPhone for my grandparents because they were intuitive and easy to use.
I have to help her more than before. It does seem that either iOS is sending her more notifications about various things which she is scared to touch.
Im not entirely sure what triggers it, but I think the fact that she doesn't get the "toolbox" view you can swipe up. I've had to help her with turning wifi back on, or screen becoming to dim.
I wouldnt be surpised if it is the swipe gestures that she randomly engages and all of the sudden the phone is doing something she didnt intend that makes her afraid of "breaking it".
Though, I havent actually tried to observe her usage.
All my main devices are Apple, but I also have a cheap Android phone, which I bought because I needed to use an app to read my passport chip at a time when Apple hadn't yet opened NFC to third party apps.
Android came with some positive usability surprises as well. For instance, the back button does something far more consistent than iOS's completely disjointed ways of going back. Also, iOS's separation of settings from the rest of the app never made any sense to me. That's fixed in Android.
But I don't think usability is what really matters. A far more important issue is ecosystem tie-in. A lot of great functionality the Apple ecosystem offers is exclusionary. Many Apple services are either unavailable or crippled on other platforms. If your friends, family and coworkers are not all Apple users you lose a lot of the benefits.
I can't even share iCloud photos with my wife or use FaceTime and Messages (beyond basic SMS). Her mp3 player supports Spotify but not Apple Music. She could easily afford any phone she likes, but she uses a 7 year old Nexus 5 because she just doesn't care. The only thing she might care about once the pandemic is over is battery life. But iPhones are nothing special at all in terms of battery life. And on the desktop she uses Linux because contrary to my Mac it supports running PyTorch and TensorFlow on the Nvidia GPU.
So we always look for cross platform options and some of the more popular ones are better integrated in Android than in iOS (such as Google, obviously, but also to a lesser degree Microsoft). I'm not subscribing to any Apple services for fear of not being able to share them with others.
Oh god, the Android back button. You just triggered my PTSD. You got all of the iOS “back” variations plus an extra “surprise me” hardware button that would sometimes even exit the app.
Hopefully that’s changed in the 5 years since I’ve tried android.
I am Swiss and for many countrymen the wallet is big enough, that we're even called an iPhone nation. But I moved to Android after iPhone 2, because I was fed up with the funny limitations Apple imposed on me, for "consistency" and "security", like:
- forcing me to sync music in iTunes, with my 500GB personal music library crashing iTunes
- no mms support, back when this was still a thing
- no video recording
- no file access
- no copy/paste functionality
later, owning a MacBook Pro in 2016, reminded me of those funny decisions Apple made for me, like no CMD+X for cutting files, no real full-screen button and regular kernel panics when connecting/disconnecting my multiple screens and MIDI devices for music production.
I since completely turned away from Apple and I am happy. Not because of my wallet, but because of the freedom of choice I gained. As a plus, yes my wallet has more left for other stuff now.
I understand and appreciate your argument, but I would like to point out that those limitations are no longer an issue. I find it more annoying to help someone in the Android world to so basic things like finding an app or changing settings, because the UI is so bizarrely inconsistent across versions of Android and models and makes. To give a recent example, a friend could not figure out to toggle WiFi on/off on his Lenovo, because when swiping the screen from above, only other things appear. One has to swipe twice, then the status bar grows and shows the WiFi symbol.
Yes, those of us who choose Android to gain some control over our tracking devices are likely to carry more cash for the privacy and autonomy benefits it brings.
Same boat here. From the iPhone 3G to the 6 I was always jailbroken, including even the tethered jailbreaks.
Then at some point I just stopped caring. It's so much effort to keep up with this stuff (same reason I don't use Android devices, with all the alternative firmwares and such). My stock iOS device is about as reliable as a device can get and I'm relatively happy making the complete freedom tradeoff. I'm not sure how bad of a thing that is however.
Occasionally I'll want to do something like spoof my location and get annoyed that it's not easy. But I just...don't care 99% of the time.
I'm like you, there are things I would like to do with my phone that I am prevented from doing but the alternative is too much effort and I don't care enough to take it.
It does seem that slowly iOS/ipadOS is getting more fully featured as they try to make the ipad a real laptop alternative.
Yes exactly and this is why I have a MacBook, which has a keyboard and a trackpad and a decent screen. I don’t want my phone to be a general purpose computer. Not everything has to be that.
Yea, it seems like purely a philosophical goal for people anymore. Just because something has a CPU, that doesn’t make it a general purpose computer. There just doesn’t seem to be any practical benefit anymore.
I remember when I was younger, and I felt this odd moral imperative to having root on any device I had that I knew ran an operating system of some sort. Once I succeeded, then... well, nothing. It was pointless. Oh, wow I got Linux running on my PlayStation 2! Root login, baby! Look, it’s X Windows!! I have harnessed the power of the machine and am finally that much closer to..... well, nothing a PC can’t already do better.
Back when I had a jailbroken iPhone (4S I believe) there were many useful, or just cool, jailbreak tweaks.
Notable ones I remember where:
1. SBSettings, basically control center before Apple added the control center.
2. Flux, before Apple added Night Mode (or whatever they call it)
3. Winterboard, for theming the phone in ways
4. Gameboy emulator, though now I think this can be done without jailbreak.
5. Unlocking the carrier.
6. File explorer
I'm sure there was more too.
For me jailbreaking is partly a philosophical goal, but also I just like seeing all the stuff people come up with when they aren't restrained by the walls of the garden.
If you read above you'll see most of the good jailbreak tweaks were brought into stock iOS at some point, which is great too. Let jailbroken users/devs try new things and if they work well bring them in with some Apple polish.
Why do you need two devices? iPhone hardware is faster than many laptops. In 2020 I should be able to trivially attach a external monitor, keyboard, trackpad, etc. to my phone and compile code on iOS for iOS. The fact that I can't is nothing more than the current zeitgeist. A laptop at this point should just be a big battery/screen/trackpad I attach to my phone.
I'm guessing it was Samsung neutering the platform. They never have really given too much time to advertising the capabilities of the platform (for example, no displays in their stores demoing the "phone as a desktop" capability).
The Samsung DeX Station (https://www.samsung.com/au/galaxy-s8-accessories/dex-station...) is no longer manufactured which is a massive let down. It does however still work with the S10+, and I presume the S20. The ability send a network cable straight to the phone was pretty handy for a few situations.
My mom refuses to use dex, I found it to be great as a basic workstation. Definitely removes the need for eg a chrome book. Does not replace your power user machine however
The HTC phone-shell-thing didn't really work, but that was more because it gave a bad experience as a laptop - both at the hardware level (phone-in-shell not being as stable or nice-feeling as a normal laptop) and the software level (non-x86 laptops kind of suck in terms of software availability).
Samsung's Dex dock thingy still exists and can be useful when travelling - most hotel rooms you can plug into the TV with HDMI, so a phone and keyboard is less trouble than carrying a full laptop. If you could rely on finding a keyboard (even just a USB one) in any hotel room it would be a lot better. And hopefully with apple shifting to ARM there'll be a lot more desktop software that runs properly on phone processors.
Should just be able to virtualize Linux/Windows inside of it. Eventually phones will be more than powerful enough to do that and we'll hotdesk with dumb terminals + phones.
I’ve got a policy: If something is a general-purpose computer for someone else, but not for me, that is not a device for me. iPhones fall squarely in that category: They’re general-purpose computers for Apple, but not for the ostensible “owners” of these devices.
Of course (as I wrote here three years ago¹), a non-programmable dumb/feature phone without updateability would also be adequate for my personal needs for what I need a phone for.
I don't understand the logic here. You seem to be saying that it's better to have a featurephone than a modern phone if you can't load arbitrary code on the modern phone, but that logic, applied broadly, would serve almost no consumers well.
Actually, I can imagine a modern "dumpphone" being a preaty nice think - make it say in a classic candybar shape and make sure it has good time on battery & can be used as wifi hotspot/mobile modem over USB.
Application could be very basic (calendar, address book, calculator, alarm, etc.) - by default. Or users could make their own simple apps - nothing fancy, Arduino like cooperative multitasking, simple screen drawing, maybe a few widget helpers.
I can imagine this being a fun thing to use & play with. :)
So are you intentionally hinting at the Light Phone, or is it news to you that someone has implemented exactly what you're describing? :) (https://www.thelightphone.com/)
First time seeing that, but it comes preatty close!
Still, being able to write your own apps for it would be nice. Even if very low level APIs & you would have to handle distribution yourself if you wanted to share them would be fine. But I don't see any information about that after quickly checking their page.
BTW, a simple mobile terminal with cellular connection that you can program could be preatty useful in comparison to hacking a regular Android phone to only do what you need could be useful as well. For stuff like single use online terminals to give to field crews.
Well, on modern Android phones you can connect a keyboard and a mouse not to mention often a big screen.
Making a smartphone that does not behave as a general purpose computer is stuping and not to mention dangerous (as the manufacturer can always use it as a general purpose computer for its own nefarious means).
> as the manufacturer can always use it as a general purpose computer for its own nefarious means
This is assuming the device is, in fact, a general purpose computer. This is true now basically all of the time, but it doesn't have to be.
I can imagine as a thought experiment an ASIC or FPGA based phone that implements a very high level application processor, while what we normally call firmware, OS and libraries are implemented in "pure hardware".
(I agree with your sentiment, but somewhat disagree with your apparent conclusion android phones are any better if you're worried about bad actors -- the baseband and DSP from Qualcomm are processors running code we can never touch underlying the entire hardware. Similarly, almost all other computer hardware have separate CPUs inside the main CPU where the mfc. runs their own secret code which cannot be tampered with or even directly seen sometimes)
Oh, no question about Android being more secure from bad actors - there are most likely multiple parties that could be problematic (Google, device manufacturer, baseband manufacturer, network operator, etc.) while with Apple its just a single such entity.
What I meant is that on Android There is less being done to actively prevent their usage as a self hosting workstation (though some recent "security" changes communig from Google related to running code that does not come from an installed APK might be a reversal of that trend).
You can use a keyboard and mouse on recent iOS versions as well (and it works very comfortably on iPadOS). You can also connect an adapter to use a big screen.
I disagree with your argument that smartphones should be general-purpose computers. I don't think that having a smartphone be a general-purpose computer provides a significantly improved amount of control for 99.9% of the population.
For now, and still in a very limited capacity. But I absolutely think a desktop mode powered by an iPhone is coming. It's almost certainly being tested at Apple, and the move to Apple Silicon only makes it more likely that this will happen. It seems reasonable that an iPhone or iPad could run containerized Mac applications in this mode. Which to me could be the biggest expansion to access to computing since the smartphone itself if it were to become popular.
I just switched back to iOS (iPhone 12 Pro) after using Android for 3 years, and there are a lot of things iOS does poorly, notifications being the most glaring one IMO.
Yeah I'm surprised by how poor iOS notifications are.
A feature I really like on Android is being able to block specific notification channels for any given app.
Want to receive notifications when your Uber is near, but don't want to receive marketing notifications? Just disable the Marketing channel in the Uber notification settings.
Of course it relies on devs to correctly mark their notification channels, but I haven't found many apps that don't.
Oh wow I didn't know about that. That's neat. I wonder if it's like a NYC CCW in that in theory you can get one but you cant really. I should try to get one. In theory I tick all the boxes (a bit of a stretch).
To be eligible for the Security Research Device Program, you must:
Be a membership Account Holder in the Apple Developer Program. I used to be, I could be again.
Have a proven track record of success in finding security issues on Apple platforms, or other modern operating systems and platforms.
I have a CVE in Signal for IOS, and some embedded device shit.
Be based in an eligible country or region.*
I am that.
Participation is not available if you are:
In any U.S. embargoed countries, on the U.S. Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Nationals, on the U.S. Department of Commerce Denied Persons List or Entity List, or on any other restricted party lists.
I am not that.
Under the legal age of majority in the jurisdiction in which you reside (18 years of age in many countries).
I am not that.
Employed by Apple currently or in the last 12 months.}
I am not that.
The one thing iOS does not have call recording.
I want to be able to record some of my calls, which is something I discovered when I got a call from a man threatening me, would be nice to have in court. It would be a really nice feature.
I used to record all my android calls, keep them around for 7 days, then delete them (unless I flagged them as important). These were VERY GOOD for things like customer service.
Android also dropped the ability to do this for a while (the the apps I was using died) and I haven't tried again in a long time. Maybe I'll look again.
While it would be a fun thing to have, in most parts of the world you have to inform the other party BEFORE you are going to record calls. Probably the reason apple left it out.
The best feature for me was being able to use carplay with youtube to watch videos, instead of the limited handful of apps that iOS paternalistically limits you too.
Ultimately it wasn't worth the hassle to keep up (and now as a bonus I'm stuck and can't update or un jailbreak).
I think it’s more that Apple has to follow the laws of the land and could get into some very hot water if they “encouraged” distracted driving by allowing it.
The big problem with letting the user decide to do something like this is that distracted driving doesn’t affect just you, but everyone around you. There’s a reason drunk driving is illegal: you’re a danger to others on the road. Hence why being a drunk passenger is fine; you’re not a danger to the other drivers on the road.
So, should Apple be restricting what the user can do with their device? Depends on who you ask. But when it comes to distracted driving, it’s pretty well agreed that it’s wrong.
----
Now, if you still want to watch YouTube while driving, you actually can. Just load up the YouTube app on your phone and hit play. They don’t stop you. Apple just won’t let you put it on your car’s screen.
I understand Apple's likely concerns about encouraging distracted driving. As a cyclist and motorcyclist I take distracted driving seriously and don't actually watch youtube videos while driving (just listen).
My issue with this argument though is that the cat is already out of the bag- by blocking youtube on a larger screen, and similarly not allowing Siri to play youtube via voice commands Apple may claim they are doing it for safety, but in reality all is does is make people manually fiddle with their phone or watch a video on a smaller screen. I just don't believe there is any real world safety benefit to the paternalistic blocking.
I used to put my iPad on the passenger dash at night and watch a movie on the windshield while I drove. I was driving across the country, for many hours a day. The trick is not to focus on the movie unless something is happening that requires being looked at (hinted by the music).
This kept me awake, and I’d hardly have called it a distraction unless you would rather me pass out at the wheel.
The “correct” course of action if you’re dozing off while driving is to pull off the road and go to sleep. If you’re in the middle of nowhere, there’s bound to be a truck stop on the side somewhere. Studies have shown that driving drowsy is the same as or even worse than driving drunk.
The biggest reason for me is to block ads on social media apps. Many of them have no way of blocking the ads (either through pi-hole or a subscription for example).
The other reason is to hide obnoxious features I'd never use that serve as screen clutter (such as stories in messenger)
I'll check it out, thanks. So you know, I have used system wide ad blocking to great success before, but years later and I had forgotten what I had installed. So, I know they exist.
And how did we get to that state? By having jailbreaks show everyone what the phone was actually capable of, and Apple had to be dragged along to what the customers actually wanted.
I jailbreaked to use the iPhone in europe, with any carrier and to use apps that weren't accepted in iOS back then. Now I don't have this need anymore, in fact my phone has the bare minimum set of apps to run.
You could if chrome or firefox actually had a specific ios jailbreak app. But why on earth would they dedicate the resources to building a whole app that hardly anyone would be able to use.
I haven't been following Jailbreak news for a while, because I'm very happy with my Jailbroken iOS 12 setup and I feel no desire to upgrade anything. Even so, looking at this project, I can't help but recognize some names among the primary developers.
I don't even remember what all the drama was about—as I recall, it was exceedingly stupid—but I know it was nasty enough to drive Saurik and much of the rest of the old guard away from the Jailbreak community for good. I really, really hope that ugliness is behind us. The Jailbreaking scene could use everyone's talent.
There was a while where basically all the jailbreaks were closed source and I think one bundled an app store from a Chinese company only and locked cydia out?
Definitely that period made me glad I had switched to android. If I'm running an exploit on my own device to take control, it damn well better be open source so I can be confident I am the only one getting control.
The moral issues with open source weapons--which is what jailbreaks should and need be considered--are myriad, as you empower increasingly weak and diverse adversaries the easier you make it to retool for different purposes. I appreciate that opinions on this matter differ; but I've struggled with these issues for well over a decade, and I still believe that "open sourcing" (which is an action that lies along a continuum) a jailbreak tool is are not ethical (and so am somewhat relieved to hear that this one isn't truly open source; though I fear that, given the authors, the parts kept closed source may be serving the wrong goal).
In case you indeed got full control. How do you know?May be someone else got full control and you got only part of control or illusion of full control with backdoor for them.
I remember having used jailbreaks years before I even knew how to use the terminal. Adding one untrusted source here and another untrusted source there, download some package from some shady forum, on public wifi with root:alpine...
Oh boy, what security risk we took only to change the default font of the system...
You typically didn't flash any random rom. You would pick one from a trusted source like cyanogenmod which would mostly be the upstream android with a few modifications which were visible on the github page.
Well, it's moreso about even having the possibility to do so. Building AOSP from source and flashing it on my own device seems more "secure" than using your device vendors distribution.
But this is out of the question with closed source proprietary software like iOS running on hardware with a closed down bootloader.
It's kind of a moot point with more and more android phones being produced with a locked-down bootloader as well—preventing any kind of OS upgrade after the manufacturer abandons it after a year (or 18 months if you're lucky).
You act like drivers for certain hardware is available by default in AOSP. I still have a Galaxy S4 that will never see a recent release because the Broadcom drivers do not exist. Some hacks were made but reduced the usability of the phone (rear camera stopped working for example). Great that it enabled a hidden audio equalizer but I can’t video chat or take pictures now :/
Ah man, back in 2013 or so I had a full Apache-MySQL-PHP development stack running on my iPad retina, along with multi-windowing, SSH, file-sharing via AFP and Bonjour and much more. Amazing what the jailbreak community could do - and that seven years later it’s still not possible to do some of that stuff officially on iOS.
I've come to strongly believe that Apple take the premise that Macs are general purpose computers and iPads are application consoles as a core philosophy. Macs will never be locked down to the degree iOS devices are, and iPads will never be open to the degree Macs are. (Barring their hand being forced by government regulators, of course.) If you want to have an iPad that can also run Xcode, they're going to point you at an Apple Silicon-based MacBook Air that can run iPad apps.
To me it would seem that the vision for iPad OS is the exact opposite. An attempt at bridging towards having the iPad as a much more generic, almost laptop solution. Close to what the Surface has been trying.
I'm not making an assertion about whether that's what I would personally do if I were in charge. I'm making an assertion about how I think Apple sees the difference between the iPad and the Mac. :)
I know it runs counter to what a lot of folks seem to think (and definitely what a lot of folks want). But it's genuinely the way I read the tea leaves. The iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard arguably is an "almost laptop solution" already -- what I'm saying is that I don't think Apple has any desire to give the iPad a Unix shell, a fully open file system, the ability to sideload apps, and so on. If you want to run Microsoft Office or Photoshop on your iPad, they think that's great, because there are iPadOS versions of it that fit within their vision of What iPads Are. If you want to run a Docker container with a local web server and Visual Studio Code on your iPad, though, I don't see that fitting in that vision.
I would love an iPad pro to run Xcode, I think prototyping an app where you have direct access to a touch screen and all sensors would be really productive.
That looks like the aim. Every change to the ipads and macbooks have taken them closer together. It seems that the end goal is you will be able to do almost anything with both of them. With the macbook being more powerful and the ipad being more portable.
Can I ask an honest question of the people that use iOS and like to jailbreak?
I don't intend this question as a troll. I'm legitimately interested in understanding your perspective.
Doesn't it make you mad that Apple makes it so hard for you to jail break your device? If you are jail breaking your device, I assume you aren't part of the "I like Apple to protect me from myself" crowd, so wouldn't an Android device with an unlocked boot loader be a more attractive platform for you?
My experience has been the opposite. I jailbroke an iPhone 6s less than a year ago just by following the jailbreak du jour instructions. Any of my non-techy friends could have done the same.
Just a few months ago I tried to install an alternate rom on a Motorola Moto e6 and was dumbfounded by how impossibly complicated it seemed. Turns out this less than one year old phone had a locked boot loader and was not compatible with any modifications like I was attempting.
Every time I jailbreak my iPhone I always end up reverting it. Cydia is so janky and everything about the mods seem so tacky, tasteless, and janky I figure why bother. I need my phone to work.
Cydia is not very slick but it does its job and you don’t have to open it very often. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say it’s about as slick as Synaptic.)
For everything else, it really depends on what you install. I think Colorflow, for instance, could very easily be mistaken for a native iOS feature.
Ah yeah, you gotta check bootloader lock status before buying. That's something that frosts me too, and it's why I pretty much only buy from OnePlus or Google.
If you buy a hack-friendly phone though, I've found it to be fairly easy to do, although I've always used CLI tools, so if someone (like non-techy friends) were to do it they'd probably be put off by the CLI.
Having used many iOS and android devices before, I usually preferred iOS devices because they were just far far more performant and snappier when running so jailbreaking was worth the inconvenience and it wasn't that hard. I remember trying out a samsung phone and the software they put on it was awful so I went straight back to an iphone at the time. But yes, it was annoying that I had to jail break it in the first place and that they kept trying to block it.
That being said, my current and last phone are the pixel 4a and 2 and they feel just as snappy as the iphones I haved used, I can install any software I want, and the 4a is really nice as it is only $350 with a fingerprint sensor and a headphone jack so I don't plan on going back to iOS any time soon.
For the majority of jailbreak users all they have to do is to use some program and you’re done. It’s simplified but as a user since 2010 that’s how I feel.
I don’t like android OS, and I like iPhones. I also like to tinker so I jailbreak.
So would it be fair to say that the baseline phone is more important to you than the hackability, so you stick with iPhone, but if a jail break opportunity comes along then you will use it?
I like iPhones as they are. They do many things I want from a phone well enough - except running sideloaded apps with Apple-exclusive entitlements. I find most Android phones annoying (suffering e.g. from poor palm rejection with borderless screens, touchscreen over-sensitivity, ads in system apps, piss-poor AAC encoding quality for Bluetooth audio, etc.)
I jailbreak because I prefer iOS over Android, and I enjoy using my phone as a PC sometimes. I also like themes, customizable app organization (like not having the standard homescreen grid), modifying my hosts file, and app modifications (like removing stories from Twitter)
I'm sorry, what what do you mean by "this?" What appeals to people for which Android is an attractive platform?
I'm specifically asking people who buy iOS devices and then want to jail break them why they aren't more attracted to an unlockable Android instead since they obviously don't like the restrictions that Apple puts in place.
People want to hack on things. If they bought a superwidgetV2.X and the superwidget doesn't allow homebrew, people would hack the superwidget for homebrew. It's just how it is.
I totally agree, people want to hack on things. I love hacking on things. But I buy things that are specifically more hackable than other things to facilitate that desire.
Or are you saying they will hack on what they have, but don't like to enough to go out and find hackable things?
I hear you, but if you're jail breaking your device aren't you opening yourself up to significant risk? You're using somebody else's exploit first of all, but then anything you install will have root on your device.
So I could see it if you were just buying an Apple device and leaving it alone, but if you're rooting I'm not sure I understand.
What kind of skills are required to get started in jailbreaking? I am guessing some assembly and C would be helpful. Not even sure what to search for to get started.
I am not really interested in jailbreaking iPhones, but I have some equipment from the early 2000s running software that are no longer maintained that I'd love to tweak.
From my experience looking at open source jailbreak repos, I’d say writing commented, maintainable code with good error checking is not a required skill.
It's just reverse engineering. You want to find some kind of actions that let you cause non-standard behavior in the implementation of privileged libraries.
Is "jailbreak" equivalent to "total root privileges"?
In other words, does the existence of a jailbreak like this also imply the same strategy could work for malware?
Or is "jailbreak" here a more targeted exploit, to allow sideloading apps?
The reason I'm curious is because Apple seems to have put lots of effort into their "secure enclave" and specialized hardware to avoid this type of situation. So I'm curious if this bypasses all that, or only part of it.
All Jailbreaks need full kernel access, but I don't believe any of them have ever gained access to the secure enclave, and most aren't even persistent after a reboot.
Malware could probably use the same exploits, yes, but the exploits used for most Jailbreaks are pretty "noisy", and I have trouble imagining a situation where they could be used without the user's knowledge. It's certainly possible though.
checkra1n has; the others have not. Jailbreaks are generally optimized for time-to-market and not discretion, but actual malware could certainly take the code and make it less likely to crash or do funny things that are easy to detect.
The su binary for android. Distributed on a mega.nz link and obfuscated. How large was the embedded botnet and what were the rare cases of good it was used for?
Me deciding not to install supersu 10 years ago. I think it’s finally been replaced with an open sourced utility but I’ve already moved on
> Is "jailbreak" equivalent to "total root privileges"?
Somewhat. Apple designs multiple layers of security into their devices and jailbreaks these days compromise some set of these, and plus the security model of iOS is really "the user vs. everything else on the operating system" so the concept of "root" is much less important. You could consider it equivalent to "rooting”, however.
> In other words, does the existence of a jailbreak like this also imply the same strategy could work for malware?
By jailbreaking the iphone, could we use Chrome or Firefox with their own web engines and features (such as web push notifications and install to desktop)?
I stopped jailbreak practice long time ago. Personally I am in a point where idea of owning "smartphone" is actually nonsense.
Convenience is king but mental clarity is a must for me. From 3 years on I have build a habit to avoid my iPhone and have tracked use cases in which I really need it. There are very small real use cases: 1. Phone call. 2. Messaging . 3 Banking apps. 4. Maps for navigation. My ideal phone is actually only a phone plus internet hot spot. In the future I can see my self using VPN firewall and replacing the list:
1. Voip 2. Mail. 3. Web browser with e certificate. 4. Separate GPS device.
I know that all of this sounds extreme, but the mental benefits are of the chart. I have enormous focus, no "fear of missing out", no "notification hell", no "social media" rush. So no jailbreak or any form of functionality will bring me back to this time waisting mental bonanza.
If smartphones are the future of mandatory personal identification governments must offer them free of charge. Just saying:)
I am always thankful to see something open sourced.
But as someone interested in understanding how it works without a lot of time on my hands, I would have loved a high level explanation to support a "genuine windows of interest".
As is, I will not be able to extract much knowledge from it.
I found the install instructions, my point is that they clash with the rest of the presentation. How can you brag about a jailbreak being 'Fast. Really Fast' when your install process is long and convoluted?
Yes, it is functionally equivalent to having Bluetooth enabled.
When Bluetooth is on, your iPhone broadcasts itself with a rotating random MAC address (a feature now called Bluetooth LE Privacy). It rotates at a fixed interval, something like every 5 minutes.
With contact tracing enabled, your phone broadcasts another random identifier, and that identifier rotates at the same interval as your MAC address. The random identifier is actually cyphertext, and the key to decrypt it is stored on your phone.
I think it should have been turned on by default if Bluetooth is turned on by default, but people would have complained very loudly.
>When Bluetooth is on, your iPhone broadcasts itself with a rotating random MAC address (a feature now called Bluetooth LE Privacy). It rotates at a fixed interval, something like every 5 minutes.
Isn't this only when the iPhone is "discoverable", which is pretty much never the case unless you have bluetooth settings open?
No, iOS devices enable Bluetooth Low Energy advertising pretty much the entire time that Bluetooth is on. This is used for features such as handover and Airdrop (and now for contact tracing, if enabled).
Well a lot of people care more about absolutism for "privacy" more than pragmatism. Quote marks since just having a cell phone is already sharing more than those anonymous tokens.
Lots of things were supposed to be anonymous/secure, right up until it turned out that they weren't. Maybe this time is different, but I can understand a reasonable person being extremely skeptical of a system that is literally designed to track the people you're around, no matter what great promises are made about it.
I kinda wonder whether it will continue to be opt-in. If COVID sticks around for another year, it may be that a harder stance is taken on monitoring transmission.
As others have pointed out, you explicitly have to turn it on and install a local exposure notification app for the feature to even be enabled.
But I would also suggest you learn how this feature works in the first place, it's an interesting design that makes clever use of Bluetooth and cryptography. It's likely much more private than the way you have your device set up right now.
iOS 13 or 14 have nothing to do with having you use contact tracing in any way you don’t enable yourself. I don’t get this. If you don’t trust them for this. Why are you using their phone at all.
