Did Apple Make Jailbreaking Redundant With iOS 8? Not Really!

Apple Inc. has just released its latest Mobile Operating System; iOS 8. As with every iteration so far, talented developers have earnestly begun their efforts to ‘Jailbreak’ the same. One such security researcher and hacker, Stefan Esser, a.k.a. “i0n1c,” is said to be pretty close at coming up with a perfectly working Jailbreak for iOS 8.

Esser is confident of having developed a semi-working Jailbreak for iOS 8 beta, but releasing a stable and fully functional iOS 8 Jailbreak might take some time, owing to the significant revision carried out by Apple to the directory structure for the critical ‘containers’ that hold the native files. If Apple hadn’t carried out such changes, Esser or i0n1c, would have had a working Jailbreak for iPhone with iOS 8 ready today, reported Ecumenical News.

Download finished. Initial tests show that iOS 8 beta does not fix anything. Dumped kernel fine, but code changed and patches are not found.

— Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) June 2, 2014

Though Jailbreaking is a very commonly executed task, it is wrought with risk, most prominent of which is voiding the warranty. Apple tries vehemently to prevent Jailbreaking as much as they can, and they even consider it a violation of the End-User Software License Agreement (EULA).

Jailbreaking is enthusiastically done by owners of iPhones or iPads to customize the iOS so it can have features that the device manufacturer (Apple) did not originally intend or does not allow. Some of the features that Apple has traditionally disallowed are having the iPhone behave as a WiFi Hotspot, third-party virtual keyboards, hiding apps from view, and allowing installation of widgets and notification extension tools.

But with iOS 8, do iPhone users need to Jailbreak their devices? Apple has traditionally been very restrictive about what it allows to run on its devices. But with iOS 8, majority of such restrictions seem to have vanished or been diluted to a great extent.

As reported by The Inquisitr earlier, iOS 8 comes with features that have traditionally been enabled only via Jailbreak. Esser’s Jailbreak for iOS 8 was to allow customization of widgets, ‘QuickReply’ via Notifications, etc. But iOS 8 already has these features. Moreover, Apple has even allowed usage of third-party keyboards. If that’s not all, iTouchSecure will even make auto-fill passwords via fingerprint scanning a reality by default.

These changes appear to make Jailbreaking redundant. However, Jailbreaking won’t go away soon as users still have a vast variety of tools and apps that are not strictly legal, and hence, are banned. The most prominent request has always been game emulators that let iPhone users play classic video games.

Judging from the improvements, it appears iOS 8 has heralded the beginning of the end of casual Jailbreaking, reported Business Insider. In fact, it was the Jailbreaking that gave birth to popular tweaks that are now mainstream features.

[Image Credit | TheNerdMag]