Dear hackers: Apple owes you nothing
Cnet reports that yesterday’s iPhone OS 3.1 update reverses ‘jailbroken’ devices. Services and apps installed by Cydia (and Cydia itself) will vanish if you update your device. Already, people are bitching about Apple being ‘invasive’, ‘closed’ and a little bit like an evil dictator that goes MWAHAHAHAHA a bit too much. So here are three helpful hints to anyone with a jailbroken device:
- Last I heard, Jobs wasn’t traveling the world, forcing you to upgrade. Just wait until the hacking software is updated or update now, lose your hacks and quit your moaning.
- Every single Apple update prior to now has reversed/wrecked unofficial hacks—why did you think this one would be any different? Apple’s remarkably consistent in this area.
- Apple owes you nothing. Seriously. Why people think Apple should support a hack is beyond me.
That third point is especially obvious when you look at Apple’s desktop OS. Every time a major bump to Mac OS X happens (and, sometimes, a minor bump) a bunch of add-on hacks keel over and die. With Snow Leopard, every Safari add-on bit the big one. But these were essentially hacks to the system potentially affecting security, and certainly doing things over and above what typical apps do. Supporting such things simply wouldn’t be feasible for Apple, and so it is also with iPhone and iPod touch hacking.
I guess people see a difference between “Not supporting” hacks and deliberately disabling you from doing what YOU want to do with a device YOU paid for. It’s a spite that is a particularly nasty trait of Apple’s.
You’re right though, you do of course have the option to just not upgrade. This would be VERY different if O2 started cutting off unupgraded iPhones.
I think Apple’s been pretty calm with the iPhone stuff—it even joked around about the number of unlocked phones in an Apple event.
As for hacks, I have it on good authority that one of the Apple updates made no attempt to deal with jailbreak code, but because Apple wasn’t testing against it, the result was a bricked iPhone. This led to lots of complaints and phone ‘fixes’ in Apple Stores, and so I suspect Apple now thinks “nuts to it”.
But that upgrade point is the main one. If people are stupid enough to upgrade their hacked phone before the hack itself is updated, they’ve only themselves to blame.