this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Explain Like I'm Five

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I remember back in the day when people would "Jailbreak" iPhones, but never really picked up on what they were doing other than that it let them do stuff that those of us with "non-jailbroken" iPhones couldn't do.

Are they just booting another OS, e.g. android? Also: why haven't I heard of it in a while? Is it not possible on newer iPhones?

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[–] thebestaquaman 12 points 1 year ago (18 children)

Ahh, that makes sense. How did you go about doing that? It's not like you have a terminal to mess around in on an iPhone? Is the reason I haven't heard of it in a while that it's harder/impossible in newer iPhones?

Also: Why would apple prevent you from having root access? The way I see it, when I buy a phone, just like a pc, I should be allowed to do what I want with it.

[–] d00phy 18 points 1 year ago (10 children)

The argument is that, for most people, letting them do what they want with something they don’t really understand is not a good idea. In this case it also creates a support headache for Apple. At first, they kind of tacitly accepted that jailbreaking was just going to happen and didn’t really actively fight it other than to close exploits used to root devices. As more and more people did it, for the reasons outlined above, more people wound up with bricked, or otherwise malfunctioning iPhones. When they went to Apple to fix it, at first there was an effort to help (you know, to retain customers), but they had voided their warranty. Because of that, Apple wasn’t really interested in spending lots of time troubleshooting something when they didn’t really know the full status of the OS (b/c there were multiple ways to jailbreak, and most of the fools taking their rooted phones to support didn’t understand enough to tell them what all was done beyond, “my kid’s friend said this would be cool”). Eventually Apple washed their hands of the whole thing and started refusing any support for rooted phones. That part, I have no problem with. They also started actively working to stop folks jailbreaking. That part, I thought, was too much. Just tell them they void the warranty by jailbreaking and refuse support. They dug their hole.

FWIW, I use an iPhone for personal use and android (Pixels) for work.

[–] Falmarri 4 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This is all such bullshit and just justifies apple's locking down of their phones for their own profit. You have root access on your macbook, a phone is no different except that companies felt like they could force people to buy through their app stores. There is 0 difference between allowing people root on their phone versus on their computer.

[–] nittiyh 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I am super scared that they eventually start locking down macOS too. I agree that it makes little sense that they do it for one platform and not the other, and I don’t see them ever backing down on it for the iPhone, so.. hopefully they never feel like making that consistent across OSes.

[–] thebestaquaman 4 points 1 year ago

I can definitely see them leaving macOS alone though. I can't imagine anyone would buy a macbook to use for development if they don't have root access, while, as far as I know, nobody buys iPhones or iPads to develop anything. If they do it would only be for testing purposes, which I assume should be fine without root access, as you're developing for an end-user that doesn't have root access.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I guess it's about the difference audiences. Developers are a decent part of Apple's MacBook customer base and without root access they're not even gonna look in your product's general direction.

[–] nittiyh 1 points 1 year ago

Absolutely right! But large tech companies have been on a trend of getting a little too greedy and daring, lately. Let’s hope they know better.

[–] d00phy 1 points 1 year ago

I would agree with this. I think the canary in that particular coal mine would be Apple working to kill off Homebrew or Macports. So far, I haven’t seen any indication that this is on the radar.

Fi used to work desktop support, and the “average user” probably has no idea what “root access” even means. I’ve seriously had someone point to my open iTerm window and ask what I was hacking. Always remember what George Carlin said about the average person.

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