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Ever since Apple unveiled Siri last month, hackers have been hard at work trying to free the technology from the company’s iron grip. Like most things in iOS, the digital assistant’s abilities are limited in order to maintain security and stability on the platform.
But, as with jailbreaking, hackers have the power to loosen Apple’s grip, and they are. The folks over at Applidium have reached a major milestone with the iPhone 4S-exclusive feature. They’ve apparently cracked Siri’s security protocol…
Not only has the team reversed the protocol, but they’ve also posted the tools that they used to do it on their website. The tools can be used by developers to implement Siri in third-party applications — it’s what Aman Gupta used to create his custom commands.
Although this is certainly a major step toward Siri freedom, The Next Web points out a significant hurdle:
“The process does have a pretty big caveat though, as it requires the unique identifier of an iPhone 4S to use as a calling card. This could give Apple the ability to block any ID that was used in this manner, although it shouldn’t stop developers from using it for their personal use. Doubtless Apple can track Siri interaction down to a UID if it tried, and if a ton more inquiries were made using one UID, from different IP addresses, it’s conceivable it could be flagged and blacklisted.”
It’ll be interesting to see what developers do with this information, and how Apple responds to it. This could lead Apple to extend Siri’s capabilities to third-party developers, the way hackers influenced the company to create the App Store. Who knows, there could even be a Siri app for Android (theoretically).
In reality, the odds of Siri coming to any device that’s not an iPhone 4S are still very, very slim.