Is iOS jailbreaking still your thing? Talking about iOS jailbreaking and its future

A while ago, iOS 11.2.1-11.3.1 jailbreak was officially released, and countless tinkerers cheered; a few days later, Electra 1.0.3 added support for iOS 11.4 jailbreak, which is suitable for iPhone X/8/8P/7/7P. But it was later confirmed that the vulnerability used for jailbreak was blocked after iOS 11.4 beta 3. Apple's rapid blocking of the vulnerability also proves that Apple is becoming less and less fond of jailbreaking. So now, is jailbreaking still as popular as before, attracting countless people? Does jailbreaking still have its charm? Let's do a truth-seeking test with the machine at hand. There is only one truth to explore by jailbreaking the machine.

Preparation before jailbreaking

First we download the tools necessary for jailbreaking:

• Jailbreak tool download address: https://coolstar.org/electra/
• Jailbreak tool installation tool: http://www.cydiaimpactor.com/

After downloading the necessary tools, let's start the exciting jailbreak.

1. After downloading Cydia Impactor, unzip and run "Impactor.exe". Drag the previously downloaded IPA file "Electra1131" into Cydia Impactor;

2. Then enter your Apple ID account and password according to the prompts (two-factor verification needs to be turned off); it is recommended to apply for a blank account specifically for this purpose.

3. An app named Electra appears on the desktop. Open "Settings->General->Device Management" to find the description file and click Trust.

4. Switch iOS to airplane mode, run the Electra App, click the "Jailbreak" button, and after Cydia appears on the main screen, turn off airplane mode and jailbreak is successful.

5. You can then install plug-ins and themes in the Cydia tool on the desktop.

Since this jailbreak is not a private jailbreak, if we don't want it anymore, we can just restart it manually or wait for the battery to run out. After restarting, you will get a supervised phone again.

Do the above steps look simple? Do you think this is a completely fool-proof tutorial? However, the truth is that we just think too much.

Take me as an example. I tried the jailbreak test on iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, which are available for jailbreak testing in the editorial department, but basically none of them succeeded. The closest time I came to success was when I got to the step of installing Cydia on iPhone X. Unfortunately, when I pressed the button, Cydia was not successfully installed on the phone. When I tried to install Cydia through other methods, in addition to a few failures, Cydia crashed after opening it.

What is it like to jailbreak?

Since it has failed, let's try it as a last resort and reboot. The jailbreak will become ineffective.

But the fact is: young people are too young and too simple.

After jailbreaking, even if we restart the phone, we still can't completely remove our jailbreak. Restarting in this jailbreak only means that the jailbreak is invalid, not completely removed. Without complete removal, we will face this problem: your WeChat payment does not allow you to pay with fingerprints.

When this prompt box popped up at first, I didn’t pay much attention to it and just followed the instructions, thinking that there was only facial recognition on the iPhone X. It turned out that WeChat’s facial recognition payment also had problems.

Horrified, I quickly ran a series of tests on the apps I usually use. The commonly used bank clients: China Merchants Bank, China Construction Bank, Bank of China, China Guangfa Bank, Pudong Development Bank, etc. did not have this problem; QQ Mail, 163 Mail, Alipay and other common apps that can call the facial recognition API also did not have the problem.

Maybe you think the lack of facial or fingerprint recognition payment is just a small problem, and I can tolerate it; there are even more frustrating things to come.

That is, the fluency is reduced and the power consumption is increased. There is no problem with the fluency in daily use, but in some cases, especially when switching programs, there will be a certain probability of pseudo-death phenomenon; the power consumption will be an annoying problem of reduced battery life. Under the same usage intensity, the power consumption will be about 5% more after jailbreaking.

Why do we jailbreak?

So assuming everything works fine after Cydia is installed, what can we do after jailbreaking? After spending time adding repositories, we are faced with a question: Why should I spend so much time jailbreaking?

Under the current iOS 11 system, there are not many things we can do without jailbreaking: for the Nine-Grid Input Method that is very much needed by Chinese people, Apple has already provided you with the Nine-Grid Input Method at the system level; even if you say that you don’t like the Nine-Grid Input Method that Apple provides you, and you want a personalized third-party input method, Apple has also opened up permissions for third-party input methods, and you can completely choose the input method you need.

Apple has provided a solution to the phone harassment protection that many users in China need. Since it is needed by users, in order to prevent you from jailbreaking, I will provide that after iOS 10, Apple has opened up the spam call permissions of 360 Manager and Tencent Manager, and even provided some apps such as JD.com with the phone harassment protection function for specific groups of people such as couriers.

In the past, you had to go into the settings to repeatedly switch on and off Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and data. iOS users envied Android users for having a pull-down control center that could quickly switch on and off some options. Since Apple didn't give us this, we created it ourselves with folk wisdom, and added such an option to the control center through jailbreaking. But later, Apple directly gave users this function, and directly chose Androidization.

Is jailbreaking necessary?

This is another old topic. Do we need jailbreaking? I think it is not. First of all, Apple has become less willful, it has begun to listen more to the needs of users, and it has also begun to keep up with the general trend: big screen, stacked cores, and large RAM. It used to be said that Apple is overbearing, it gives consumers what it wants, never vague, never procrastinating, we can choose but have no choice, we can only learn to accept it, because it is the best, so that when the Android camp began to enter the era of large or even giant screens, Apple still went its own way and insisted on its small screen.

When we need certain functions, or when more and more jailbreak developers do this, Apple also begins to consider whether to follow suit. It starts to imitate others and learn from others. Maybe it doesn’t learn well at the beginning. Sometimes it chooses to directly acquire the team to achieve the fastest goal. This also shows its good style of constantly changing for users.

At the beginning, we jailbroken the phone more to make it more efficient so that we could use it more conveniently. Before the rise of mobile online games, when mobile games were still stand-alone, the prices of high-quality mobile games remained high. At that time, copyright awareness in China was not high, one of the reasons for jailbreaking was to install pirated games.

In order to maintain the sustainability of the ecosystem, Apple has also taken corresponding measures: lowering the prices of high-quality games, especially in domestic stores, where high-quality games and applications priced at 1 yuan, 3 yuan, 6 yuan, and 12 yuan are emerging in an endless stream.

The addition of more payment methods makes it more convenient for everyone to purchase apps: in addition to the original payment or recharge by bank card, after the addition of Alipay and WeChat Pay, people's enthusiasm for purchasing software has continued to rise, causing a certain surge in app sales in China; the original one-time fee game was changed to krypton gold, allowing more players to become recharge players.

Another very important thing is that in Apple's ecosystem, we pursue stability and efficiency, but jailbreaking destroys this ecosystem. Every time before jailbreaking, there is always a reminder: there is a risk of losing data or the device cannot be turned on after jailbreaking. And the bearer of these risks must be the user himself; in terms of use, there may not be very serious problems in a short period of time, but the impact of jailbreaking on the stability of the phone is objective, increasing the pressure on the phone's processor and memory, making the phone less stable, and even the lag phenomenon that rarely occurs on Apple has become a normal phenomenon after jailbreaking.

Save you after jailbreak

After you have gone through all the above procedures, you suddenly find that you don’t want to jailbreak anymore. What should you do?

In the past, after jailbreaking an Apple phone, you could use the Cydia plug-in to clear the jailbreak and then reset the phone to get a non-jailbroken device; when you directly flash the device, you will only get a white apple and then have to flash it again. This time, the author took a risk in the no zuo no die situation: the computer was connected to iTunes, and then the system was updated directly after backing up through the computer. This operation did not cause the white apple phenomenon. On the contrary, this time it simply upgraded the original iOS 11.2.5 to iOS 11.4.1, and there was no need to restore the data again, which achieved a low-cost clear jailbreak.

Conclusion

Does iOS jailbreaking still have great value? The answer is no. As of press time, the number of people who have successfully jailbroken is only about 190,000. Is this a large number? In front of the huge number of iOS users, this number is huge, and in front of the huge number of iOS 11 users, it is not worth mentioning at all. The era of relying on jailbreaking to add more to mobile phones has passed. In front of the increasingly Android-based iOS system and Apple that listens more and more to user needs, jailbreaking has become more and more a kind of entertainment activity that is popular but not popular, and it may become a spiritual totem: generations of loyal users continue to embark on this road for the so-called openness and freedom, but they shrink back from the thorns on this road, and finally leave the memories of jailbreaking in the past.