Stefan Esser, better known as i0n1c, is a prominent member of the jailbreak community. His untethered exploit was responsible for the jailbreak that lasted from iOS 4 to 4.3.3, and he has been contributing to the Dev Team for quite some time.
i0n1c’s untethered jailbreak may have been killed in iOS 5, but he’s got a new and very controversial idea for another iOS 5 jailbreak in the future: blocking access to pirated apps.
It’s no secret that app piracy is one of the main reason people jailbreak the iPhone. Once jailbroken, you have access to repositories that provide free copies of paid apps in the App Store and Cydia Store.
i0n1c, like most developers, hates app piracy. For the most part, people that create apps view piracy as stealing. And the jailbreak scene has been responsible for the ease of access to pirated content that is available today.
The idea of a jailbreak that intentionally blocks pirated apps from running on the device is a very interesting one indeed. If i0n1c does indeed provide the untethered exploit for iOS 5, he could very well implement such a restriction in his jailbreak. At this point, it sounds like he’s only contemplating that possibility.
How do you feel about this? Is it up to the person that creates the jailbreak to determine if users can pirate apps or not? Should that power be in the hands of devs like i0n1c? If pirated content is no longer available in a jailbreak, would you even jailbreak at all?
There’s a lot to think about.