One aspect of the jailbreak scene that always seemed like black magic to me, though, was the process of jailbreaking itself. The prospect is pretty remarkable: take any off-the-shelf iPhone, then enact obscene rituals and recite eldritch incantations until the shackles drop away. The OS will now allow you to run any code you point at it, irrespective of whether the code has gone through Apple’s blessed signing process, paving the way for industrious tweak developers like myself.
A few weeks ago, I got a hankering to remove this shroud of mystery from jailbreaks by writing my own. One caveat: the really juicy work here has been done by my forebears. I’m particularly indebted to p0sixninja and axi0mx, who have graciously shared their knowledge via open source.
The fact this isn’t a switch to flip in iOS somewhere is idiotic and will soon come to an end thanks to the EU, but at least it enticed some very creative and gifted souls to learn and experiment.
Let’s see how this plays out first. Potential caveats:
1) Apple allows this only for EU models (unlike USB-C, allowing sideloading is a software switch so it doesn’t require a separate production line)
2) Apple gives sideloaded apps a crippled runtime that’s not good for anything (think of how the Microsoft POSIX subsystem implemented the absolute minimum legally required and nothing more).
kurkosdr,
I thought this as well when I read that line. Apple are clever, they may fit the letter of the law while violating the spirit of it. My fingers are crossed and I’m hoping for the best, but we have to see what happens first before calling this one a success.
Much like right to repair movements fought for access to repair parts, apple technically delivered but their solution is so cumbersome and controlling that they’ve managed to retain effective impediments in place for the competition.