New iPhone jailbreak workarounds are released as often as iOS updates, but Friday’s news that an untethered jailbreak for the iPhone 4S had been achieved is unquestionably the most devastating blow to Scott Forstall’s mobile division since the humiliating jailbreakme.com arrived on the scene for iOS 4 devices last August.
In fact, in light of a coder getting Siri on an iPhone 4 connecting to Apple’s servers, it could be even worse. For the first time, your average user may have a real, compelling reason to jailbreak their iPhone 4 – and not buy another for years.
Over the weekend, Apple suffered two major setbacks. On Friday, the first video evidence of an untethered iPhone jailbreak for iOS 5 emerged. Jailbreaking allows you to run apps that have not been approved by Apple, and untethered jailbreaks are more suitable for public release, as they don’t require your iPhone to be plugged into a computer on restart every time.
That was shortly followed by another major breakthrough: a developer had not only managed to get the iPhone 4S exclusive Siri voice assistant running on an older iPhone 4 and iPod touch, they had got it to connect to Apple’s servers (the whole point of Siri, and the previous stumbling block for hackers) and return voice queries as normal. As you can see in the video below, it works flawlessly:
Until now, it’s been generally assumed that the reason Siri wasn’t rolled out to older devices such as the iPhone 4 was the need for the dual-core A5 processor. As this video demonstrates, with jailbroken devices that’s far from the case. “The Siri software needs to cache data, needs to access a big dataset at wide bandwidth and needs a big processor to crunch all of the numbers,” Norman Winarsky, an academic who helped assemble the Siri team told 9to5Mac this month.
Clearly, the iPhone 4′s A4 processor is big enough. It’s all about the upsell though, and Apple needs to provide enough reasons for customers to upgrade (some would argue understandably, given it’s the world’s second largest business and owes its shareholders a responsibility): in the case of the iPhone 4S, Siri is unquestionably it.
That’s why however, a new iPhone jailbreak could be devastating for Apple. With each successive release of iOS, Apple’s removed a reason to jailbreak, be it multi-tasking, Wi-Fi hotspot sharing or unobtrusive notifications – but Siri could have people queuing up outside the virtual doors of Cydia once again.
The company is gearing up for its biggest quarter ever: pundits are predicting it could make as much as $40bn (£25bn) between now and January. A large part of that potential market will be current iPhone owners upgrading and hoping for a shiny new iPhone 4S under the tree – indeed, market analyst Horace Dediu estimates that there are as many as 70million iPhone 4 owners out there. If a simple way to jailbreak your iPhone hits before then, combined with an easy to use Siri hack, that could take every single iPhone 4 owner off the market.
An iPhone jailbreak would cease to be a niche need for power users, and instead bring a headline feature of the iPhone 4S back a generation (and it’s by no means clear that Siri won’t run on an iPhone 3GS either). At at least £500 per iPhone 4S, that could translate to a £35 billion pound problem for Apple.
Now to be clear, jailbreaking devices is far from a bad thing. Microsoft has worked closely withe Windows Phone jail breakers to provide software for hobbyists to run homebrew apps. In the case of the iPhone, a US court even ruled it legal. End user license agreements (EULAs) stating otherwise are about as valid as an IOU from the Greek government. Why shouldn’t you be allowed to install what you like on what you paid for?
Though a public iPhone jailbreak for iOS 5 is surely inevitable, it’s also by no means clear that this Siri hack will be made public: the hacker in question says it’s a messy 20 step process right now, and he “could not be a part of” releasing it on Cydia. But as the likes of the iPhone Dev Team and Comex have proved time and time again, what you can never do is assume Apple’s security measures will prevail.
While the iPhone jailbreak scene has been an unspoken source of inspiration for Cupertino for years, this time round, it might just come back to bite its bottom line.
What do you think? Would you hack your iPhone 4 to run Siri and eschew the iPhone 4S? Pipe up with your thoughts in the comments below.
Image credit: 9to5Mac
