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Back in the day it was the only way to add functionality Apple itself refused to impliment in iOS. App switching, control center, fast toggling of airplane mode and wireless radios. Heck even app folders on the home screen and notifications on the lock screen were originally introduced via Jailbreaking years before Apple finally adopted them. I started Jailbreaking around iOS 5, back when AT&T refused to allow hotspot functionality to those of us on grandfathered unlimited plans. Right up until iOS 9, my phones always had custom font, layouts, carrier text and sounds. I even had blinking Christmas lights wrapped around my lock screen during the holidays. The freedom and flexibility Jailbreaking allowed made the best hardware on the market that much more powerful. Eventually, Apple pulled its head out of its butt, realized users were resorting to Jailbreaking for a valid reason, and started to adopt the best parts of Jailbreaking such as F.Lux which they renamed Night Shift, instead of ostracizing users for wanting to Jailbreak.
Because of that, nowadays there just really isn’t a reason to Jailbreak anymore, which is why it’s fallen out of favor.
What a nice write-up. Thank you for that.
 
No, it's not. Jailbreaking has been mostly pointless for quite some time now. The upsides of it are minuscule, and downsides are huge - major one being a massive security hole of keeping your personal data on what's basically is an insecure hacked device.

I used to jailbreak religiously since the original iPhone 2G.. But would not even consider jailbreaking now, even if JB was readily available.
The security holes don’t exist unless you have OpenSSH installed and didn’t change the root password once you installed OpenSSH.
 
Jailbreaking is what helps breed innovation for iOS. Some of the most common/basic features have been made because of the jailbreak community. Apple has even hired jailbreakers to work for them.

They just should leave a backdoor open for jailbreak crackers to find so iOS can continue to evolve.
 
There is still plenty of reason to jailbreak, but the problem is the bug bounties that are available when an exploit is found. There's less incentive to release a public jailbreak when you can take the same exploits needed to make it and present it to Apple or another entity and make out like a bandit for handing them over.
 
Jailbreaking is what helps breed innovation for iOS. Some of the most common/basic features have been made because of the jailbreak community. Apple has even hired jailbreakers to work for them.

They just should leave a backdoor open for jailbreak crackers to find so iOS can continue to evolve.

...or just common things that would have been added naturally over the years.

no reason to JB anymore. Maybe 3-4 years ago but now I wouldn't bother. Tired of the constant reboots and freezes.
 
I think a lot of the fascination was with people who wanted it to be as customisable as Android, which isn't really the point of iOS by design.

Also along with jailbreaks came the vulnerabilities, bugs, and unexpected behaviour. Plus many people quickly realised they didn't actually want their iPhone home screen to look like a HTC or Windows XP.
 
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Jailbreaking allows you to do whatever the heck you want with iOS. It wasn’t just apps, it was tweaks and themes to make the experience better, and oh man iOS needs it right now. iOS 11 is one of the worst iOS versions I’ve ever seen.

iOS 11 has been critiqued for stability and reliability issues, not that of missing features.

You’re insinuating that Jailbreaking makes iOS inherently more reliable/stable?! LOL
 
Well I guess that marks the end of it then. Should be alright for now with just Big Boss. Most of the good stuff can be found there anyway, but it still marks what soon will be end of jailbreaking.

I understand that most of the major features have been added to iOS over the years (the stuff they stubbornly omitted previously), but it will be a shame to not have the opportunity to customize iOS, and more importantly tweak all the crap that sucks right now. iOS 11 is even worse than iOS 10, and I'm missing jailbreak now more than ever.
 
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I mostly used jailbreak in iPhone 4 days to get around annoyances I had with iOS at the time. iOS has improved and fixed many of the issues I had with it but there are times that I still wish I had more options to customize. iOS still has nonsense like the App store cellular download size limits or in the latest iOS version it tries to get me to put in my data for Apple Pay which I will never use on my iPad so I have to keep that ****ing notification badge on the Settings icon forever apparently.

Hell, jailbreak hacks even allowed using a Bluetooth mouse on the iPad, like many would like to so they can use it more like a laptop replacement.

Apple has also taken a lot of features from the jailbreak community. For example the original iPad multitasking was available for maybe a year before Apple implemented it almost exactly the same way.

The main reason for jailbreak decline is that it has become harder to hack iOS. Which is kind of good but it wouldn't kill Apple to open up more ways for developers to add new features to the OS.
 
iOS 11 has been critiqued for stability and reliability issues, not that of missing features.

You’re insinuating that Jailbreaking makes iOS inherently more reliable/stable?! LOL
Well I guess that you were never aware of the patches that devs released for iOS to fix bugs and glitches in older versions in the Cydia store. Being able to fix bugs without updating is wonderful. Ignorance like that annoys me.
 
Jailbreaking became sucky because:
- It's harder to do now / requires installing sketchy stuff, often closed-source and from a Chinese company.
- iOS has a lot of the features people used to jailbreak for.
- There are too many iOS versions and devices, especially the minor updates to iOS.
- We're storing bank info on our phones now and can't afford to be hacked.

I used to always jailbreak my device. It was great for all the little things I wanted to tweak, like deleting the shutter sound. Was also nice having a terminal and Nintendo emulators.
 
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A sad day for jailbreakers


But I feel like an X jailbreak will come out and re ignite the scene
 
I think you may be oversimplifying. The reasons for jailbreaking are far less than they were. On an early iPhone you couldn't do video recording, copy/paste, tethering... these were fundamental features that Apple didn't implement. Current iOS features that are still lacking and therefore warrants a jailbreak caters more to niche users than it did before.

The need for most people to jailbreak has definitely lessened as a large majority of things they need to do already exists.
I used to jailbreak so I could play music while I was in another app and for folders. Apple added both a long time ago.

That being said, I recently got CarPlay and I would love the ability to use Google Maps/ Waze or be able to pull up a YouTube while my car is parked. That being said, it is too much trouble to jailbreak, so I live with those couple of issues.
 
recently jailbroke a 4S so I could downgrade it back to iOS6. Wasnt being used for anything else and I wanted to have the best (IMO) version of Apple's basic music player app, to use as a dedicated mp3 player.
i was surprised at how easy it was. much easier than it was back in the day. but that might have to do more with the specific exploit used on the 4S to downgrade.
but man am I happy to have that music app again.
 
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I still want my emulators and youtube background playing and without advertisements, and many MANY people agreed to my iphone x tweaks suggested for the iphone x.
Jailbreaking is indeed losing popularity and that is unfortunate.

I mostly blame apple’s bug bounty program for this, though.
 
recently jailbroke a 4S so I could downgrade it back to iOS6. Wasnt being used for anything else and I wanted to have the best (IMO) version of Apple's basic music player app, to use as a dedicated mp3 player.
i was surprised at how easy it was. much easier than it was back in the day. but that might have to do more with the specific exploit used on the 4S to downgrade.
but man am I happy to have that music app again.
I used to have an iPhone 5 running iOS 6. Best phone ever, best music app ever. And my experience has been downgraded ever since.
 
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