Τα τελευταία χρόνια με τον περιορισμό στις ομάδες και τα άτομα που ασχολούνταν ενεργά με το άθλημα του JB (βλ. "Γιωργάκης", Dev-Team, evad3rs, TaiG), υπήρχε πάντα αυτή η "τιμημένη" καραμέλα για το "τέλος του JB". Αποκορύφωμα βέβαια σε αυτό ήταν σίγουρα το iOS 9 και το Semi Untethered JB της 9.3.x απο την Pangu, όπου και ήρθε να μας θυμίσει εποχές iOS 3 με τα τότε Semi Tethered, απλά στο πιο εξελιγμένο.
Βέβαια η ομάδα της Pangu έχει αρχίσει να αποκόπτεται και αυτή απο τη JB σκηνή ακουλουθώντας τα βήματα των προκατόχων τους, τόσο για να επικεντρωθούν στη δουλειά τους (τα $$$ είναι πολλά φίλε Άρη), όσο και γιατί αποτελούν τους επίσημους ερευνητές ασφαλείας της CNNVD (China National Vulnerability Database of Information Security). Το αν θα δούμε ξανά κάτι απο αυτούς μετά και το Demo JB της 10.3.1 στη παρουσίαση της Janus, είναι λίγο δύσκολο έως απίθανο για τους παραπάνω λόγους.
Και κάπως έτσι, φτάνουμε σε ένα πολύ ενδιαφέρον άρθρο για την ιστορία και την εξέλιξη του JB όλα αυτά τα χρόνια, το παρόν και το μέλλον. Τα περισσότερα για όσους απο εμάς τα έχουν ζήσει απο την αρχή ίσως είναι γνωστά. Παρόλα αυτά υπάρχουν μερικά ενδιαφέροντα σημεία που αξίζει να σταθούμε..
Comex: "I feel like jailbreak's basically dead at this point"
Μούσιας (a.k.a. Saurik): "Apple has both upped priority on fixing jailbreaks but also we have moved so far up the stack that we're actually dangerous. What do you get in the end? It used to be that you got killer features that almost were the reason you owned the phone. And now you get a small minor modification.
That turns into, like, a death spiral, where when you get fewer people bothering to jailbreak you get fewer developers targeting interesting things, which means there's less reasons for people to jailbreak. Which means there's fewer people jailbreaking, which causes there to be less developers bothering to target it. And then you slowly die."
Ο Saurik τοποθετήκε εκ νέου στο Reddit προσθέτοντας κάποια επιπλέον στοιχεία, προτείνοντας στο τέλος οι χρήστες να μην(!) προχωρούν σε JB της συσκευής.
Due to an ambiguity in English usage, I'm going to clarify that that statement is 100% technically accurate: I no longer ever come across a person and go "dude, you should jailbreak". This is something I used to do constantly; I would occasionally look at people like they were idiots if they didn't jailbreak, and I have gone so far as, when dealing with recalcitrant people at developer conferences who insist that they hate the entire idea of jailbreaking, to call into question how anyone can even call themselves a developer and not have a jailbroken device.
Now, I just can't do that: the process is sufficiently broken and painful and awkwardly dangerous that when people ask me about jailbreaking I just give them this sad spiel about how I think the community would have been much better off had iOS 10 not been jailbroken at all. Yes: there are a bunch of people on this subreddit who use iOS 10 in a jailbroken state, but the vast majority of the normal users in the jailbreak world are still on iOS 7-9... those jailbreaks were easy to use while actually being stable and reliable. iOS 10 jailbreaks just aren't.
This iOS 10 jailbreak has been brutal. If jailbreaking had died as of iOS 9, we could have gone "jailbreaking was important, but now isn't possible: maybe we need legislation to require people do not build closed devices". You have to remember: jailbreaking is nothing more than a horribly broken stopgap, and exemptions from the DMCA are a short term game.
I've been waiting for jailbreaking to die so we can move to "phase 2" of the battle; that's where it should have gotten good, and why I've been holding out in this ecosystem for years now.
But... this iOS 10 jailbreak cycle... OMG was this a debacle. We had this jailbreak come out with an exploit that was already burned and so the window was an incredibly small amount of time, meaning that almost no one got to even use it; yet the developers in the ecosystem took that opportunity to upgrade and start announcing that they were going to stop supporting older versions of iOS with their extensions, even though even to this day 85% of the userbase is using iOS 7-9 (see the graph that I released yesterday, with weekly active users).
The people who did upgrade ended up being guinea pigs for the least stable jailbreak ever, with a known limitation (that Substrate did not work) which people insisted upon trying to package workarounds for, leading even more end users to have not just bad but outright shitty experiences. Most of the stability issues were eventually fixed, but only with a whole new jailbreak essentially being written around new exploits, which left all the users running the new iPhone 7 behind. The developer of these jailbreaks then just quit the scene in a huff...
...until he came back, released a few updates, and then stopped again. So, you now get to choose between beta 4 of one program, beta 7 of another program, or one of either beta 3 or beta 4-1 of a third, in order to jailbreak your device with a tool from a website that no longer even tries to feel like a product (which even purplera1n managed to do), manages to tie itself--for no good reason! :/--to North Korea when users were already anxious about using tools from China, and which still (of necessity) is of the form "keep trying it until it works".
Sit back and think about what this kind of experience means to people who aren't developers or extreme enthusiasts.
The perception shift of jailbreaking due to this jailbreak cycle has been so completely brutal it is difficult to even describe if you spend a lot of your time talking on this subreddit with all the other people who are able to follow all this, maybe even are (horribly) excited by watching people argue, and are of course part of a massive selection bias for "people who managed to actually still have a jailbroken device". This was a painfully low note
.
Regardless, with all of that said, this is where that ambiguity comes in--and I clarify this even though I am not sure I'm seeing (at least as of when I started typing this, and I probably only skimmed anyway) people who think this, but this is totally a valid English interpretation of what this sentence says, and I can imagine people thinking it and not saying it--I certainly do not recommend people not jailbreak. I no longer recommend that people jailbreak their devices, and have not for well over a year now; but if you want to, of course you should.
Τέλος όχι.. Σταγονόμετρο, ναι..
