The jailbreak is dead

Cydia and the Jailbreak are dead, and I have not said it (I have thought so for a long time), it has been said by some of the most famous hackers of these ten years that the iPhone carries among us, including Cydia creator Jay Freeman (Saurik).

In an article published on Motherboard, the best known hackers in the world of Jailbreak talk about the current situation of the Jailbreak. The reality is that with most of these geniuses out of this world and dedicating themselves to other tasks, and with an increasingly armored iOS, the game is over just as Saurik explains, even advising against jailbreaking nowadays.

The Jailbreak was born with the first iPhone. A device that did not include a miserable game, nor an application store to install something that did not come pre-installed on the device. You could not connect a cable and pass a file to the terminal, there were no customization options ... The iPhone was a revolutionary device but it lacked many features that other less advanced terminals did have and people missed a lot. That's where the Jailbreak and Cydia made sense.

For years well-known names such as geohot, comex, i0n1c and teams like iPhone Dev Team, or more recently Evaders managed to generate a huge expectation among iPhone users with each announcement of a new available Jailbreak. Steve Jobs himself even said that Apple played cat and mouse with hackers, since each Jailbreak corresponded to a system update that made it useless, and to start again.

It was about offering users something that Apple didn't give them. Applications to take advantage of functions that iOS did not include, or tweaks that modified some of those that already existed but were very limited. The first notification center came from Cydia, as well as the possibility of sharing files via Bluetooth or sharing the internet, or something as basic as copy and paste. Third-party keyboards, the control center with buttons for Bluetooth or WiFi, the possibility of changing the wallpaper or the ringtone, multitasking ... the list of functions that came before Cydia than iOS is very long, but the situation is currently very different.

There were so many elementary things that people wanted to have on their iPhone that it was really easy to offer solutions.

These words of Saurik were continued in the interview of a recommendation: "I don't advise anyone to jailbreak now". The risk of someone accessing all your information easily with the jailbreak done is so high that it is no longer worth it, because we hardly get anything in return.

What do you get? You used to get extraordinary features that made it worth the risk, but now all you get is minor tweaks.

With rewards that can reach a million dollars for those who discover a security flaw in iOS, the reality is that Jailbreak is no longer a priority target for hackers. If people are not interested in Jailbreak, fewer and fewer hackers are engaged in it, not only to develop it but to create interesting applications and tweaks, so that people are less and less interested in the Jailbreak, closing this endless circle that has ended in the current situation.

The hopes of many were pinned on Luca Todesco (@qwertyoruiop) but after his announcement that he was leaving the Jailbreak, the scene is emptier than ever. Some Jailbreaks may continue to appear by Chinese hackers like the last ones we have had (of a more than questionable quality), but the reality, badly for many, is that the Jailbreak is increasingly interesting to fewer people. It has taken 10 years, but it seems that Apple is close to reaching its goal.