A decision in the US now means that the forthcoming iPhone 4 jailbreak won’t be deemed illegal by the courts there. But Apple still has the provisions of its end user agreement which forbids any attempt to “modify” or reverse engineer iOS which means it could still go after after the iPhone 4 jailbreak creators and iPhone 4 owners who decide to smash open the software. It hasn’t in the past though and here’s why it shouldn’t now…
The case for leaving the iPhone jailbreak community to it rests on the question of who actually owns your phone and the software on it. While you might think that once you’ve got the iPhone 4 in your mitts, it’s yours to do with as you wish, Apple’s licence says you can’t go messing around with the software.
Apple lists its reasons for not jailbreaking your iPhone in an article on its Support pages. Its five points are: your devices and apps could become unstable, your voice and data connections could become unreliable (which may seen ironic to some in the wake of the iPhone 4 antenna brouhaha), services like email could be disrupted, security could be compromised, battery life could be shortened and you might not be able to install future software updates.
That long list of potential pitfalls is likely to be enough to dissuade most users from jumping for the iPhone 4 jailbreak when it arrives. But if you want to take the risk, why shouldn’t you? By jailbreaking your iPhone, you lose the right to support from Apple if your phone goes wrong but that’s your choice.
And when it comes to the iPhone jailbreak creators, the vast majority are simply enthusiasts. The iPhone Dev Team doesn’t charge for its jailbreak tools. The reward for those coders is the challenge of outsmarting Apple’s attempts to stop them.
As I wrote in my last iPhone 4 jailbreak opinion piece, tinkering by the unofficial iPhone developer community has offered up features and solutions that have found their way into official Apple releases. Unless it’s faced with piracy, Apple should leave the iPhone 4 jailbreak coders to it – the vast majority of iPhone 4 owners will never know they exist anyway.
I think the intense desire to unpick, tweak and improve iOS speaks volumes about the fanaticism that surrounds the iPhone. Comex, the brains behind the Spirit iPhone jailbreak, was 17 when he created it (he turned 18 a few months back) and is now hard at work on the iPhone 4 jailbreak. He’s doing it for fun, not profit.
It’s understandable that Apple is frustrated by the iPhone jailbreak community. It works hard to create products that it has total control over. But the number of people actually using the iPhone 4 jailbreak will be minor. To nick a tune from Pink Floyd: hey, Apple, leave those coder kids alone!
