The advantages and disadvantages of jailbreaking your iPhone are a topic you may wish to consider if you’re on your way to altering your system. Similar to what I had to say on the advantages and disadvantages of rooting your Android phone, this article will show you in a summarized way what are the pros and cons of privilege escalation on iOS. If you’re not familiar at all with the topic of this article and are just getting to know what jailbreaking is and how it works, read on.
Let’s take a look at how iOS works. Just like Android, it is based on a UNIX-type system and with current revisions, it has become more and more UNIX compatible but remains officially incompatible due to the fact that users are not given shell access to the system without modifications(you can’t open a “terminal” or “command prompt” on it out of the box). iOS shares a lot of its core components with its bigger brother, Mac OS X. They also share the same origins with both being based on an intermediary system Apple worked on in 2000, called Darwin. iOS inherits the kernel of Darwin OS. If you don’t know what a kernel is in this context, it is the core component of any UNIX-type system which handles the input and output of instructions to the computer’s hardware, basically linking the software with the physical components of your system. OS X shares the same kernel as well which could, in a way, mean that apps would be cross compatible between mobile devices and macs and macbooks but the set of instructions they pass to the hardware is the only thing they share often. Desktop and mobile apps use different software components, for example, to render their interface and they are not cross compatible entirely thus far. However, seeing how MS Windows is handling the relations between mobile and desktop, this sort of going back and forth through different platforms is not that far away in the future.
Back to iOS for now. This mobile operating system holds the second biggest market share on mobile devices of any sort, after Android. Were it not for the fact that it is restricted to a single series of devices made by just one company, it would probably be far more widespread. The two systems may look completely different but they also have many similarities in the way they work since behind the flashy interface of either runs a good old Unix standard compatible (or close to) system. They also differ in the way that they work, iOS being far more restrictive and tinkering-unfriendly but also a bit more polished and stable. People who want more out of their device always find a way, though. With rooting on Android and jailbreaking on iOS, privilege escalation has become an increasingly common course of action for new as well as seasoned users. Let’s see what is there to it that makes it so attractive and the downsides it may present – the advantages and disadvantages to jailbreaking your iPhone.
