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Mon, 4 Jan 2010

Broken out of jail

Today I jailbroke my phone, using the stupidly named blackra1n, and following the step-by-step guide here. There were a couple of points during the jailbreak at which iTunes tried to start - presumably something it did made the iPhone appear to have been just plugged in and so iTunes tried to start, and so I killed iTunes each time with extreme prejudice before it had a chance to communicate with the iPhone and potentially brick it. In retrospect, I should have turned that off in iTunes first before doing this.

Everything seems to have worked just fine.

So far I've found and installed the following apps:

  • Backgrounder
  • Categories
  • some five-icon dock thing
  • some five-icons-per-line launcher thing
  • SBSettings
  • OpenSSH

What other apps should I try out?

The quality of non-Appstore apps is definitely lower than that of officially sanctioned ones in the Apple Appstore - a few others that I've tried, in particular Winterboard and Terminal, have been quite buggy and I've removed them. Even so, it's the user's choice to install dodgy software from third parties, and Apple shouldn't make it so hard for people to shoot themselves in the foot if they want to do that. Either they should allow unvetted apps into the Appstore (and have it pop up a gigantic warning every time you try to install one, and segregate them in a ghetto so that you don't accidentally stumble across them) or they should officially support installing apps from third-party sources (again with warnings).

Posted at 00:20 by David Cantrell
keywords: geeky | hacking | iphone | phone
Permalink | 2 Comments

Did you jailbreak it just so you could run the extra apps?

Is your phone out of warranty already - or do you just not care?

Posted by Robert on Mon, 4 Jan 2010 at 09:18:39


I jailbroke mostly for the Categories app, as once you have more than a dozen or so applications installed, the launcher becomes very messy and I was finding it difficult to find some of my less commonly used apps. It's still in the guarantee period, but if anything goes wrong I can just do a hardware reset before I go to shout at Apple. I've also realised that jailbreaking makes listening to radio on my iPhone (using FStream) practical, as I can leave the radio app running in the background while I get on with other stuff. Yay test match special!

Posted by David Cantrell on Mon, 4 Jan 2010 at 11:28:11


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