7 Advantages and Disadvantages of Jailbreaking your iPhone

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.

Advantages:

So Many New Apps

Jailbreaking your iPhone opens otherwise impossible access to an appstore-like framework called Cydia. Cydia lets you browse from the tons of apps, otherwise unauthorized on the appstore or just existing only in Cydia due to their need of a jailbroken device to run. The reason for the existence of a whole other marketplace is the fact that Apple is exceptionally restrictive in the type of content it allows on their appstore.

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Tethering of the Free Variety

In the US, as well as some other parts of the world, mobile carriers still charge extra for tethering traffic. While in certain parts of the world you can tether your connection and pay for the data on your normal 3G/4G plan, this is impossible on a stock iPhone unless you’ve jailbroken it.

Countless Customization Options

Tired of the user interface? Tired of just one icon? Don’t like how that new game’s icon does not fit with the others or just want to make a slight change here and there or add additional options to menus? You can do that and it’s easy as breeze on a jailbroken iPhone whereas it’s impossible on a vanilla (normal) one.

Tinkering Unchained

If you’re someone who likes to take things apart just to see how they work, you can gain easy access to the good, old command line interface that runs behind the UI. What is more, downloading and installing different apps that can work via the command line or just using the provided set of commands, you can unleash a whole new learning experience.

Disadvantages:

Security Risks

Once you give an app root privileges (yes, the unrestricted user called root even on iOS) you have no guarantee that it won’t go rogue on you and steal or destroy your data just for fun. There is little you can do about it but there are already safety measures in place either on Cydia or in the phone itself. Just be careful.

System Updates

You will still be able to do them but they will leave you with a memory of what your phone used to look like and your jailbreak will be gone. Apps that depend on you having a jailbroken device will not work and other unofficial apps that depend on previous system version components will malfunction as well.

Instability

More apps and more of you picking at you phone’s software innards means more crashes and random errors you have never imagined encountering. This doesn’t mean all the time but depending on what you do and how severely it affects your phone it might become annoying.  This minor final flaw concludes the list of advantages and disadvantages of jailbreaking your iPhone.