A while back, we ran a story that entitled: iOS 5 to Kill the Jailbreak Community? That was of course, before Apple unveiled iOS 5 at the 2011 WWDC at Moscone West.
The purpose of that article, was to call out Apple’s not so subtle means of usurping the jailbreak throne by making jailbreaking less glamorous, less desirable. Essentially, Apple was planning on taking some of the best features of jailbreaking, and bake it right into their new OS.
Since then, I’ve tested multiple betas of iOS 5 on everything including the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. While it does make quite a few of the jailbreak community’s apps — at best redundant, at worst, totally obsolete or unecesarry — it’s far from the end of the world for the jailbreak community.
In fact, I strongly feel that jailbreaking can and will be reinvigorated with iOS 5; inside, I’ll explain why…
End User Innovation is Far From Dead
[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9GZP9qFIZg[/tube]
More New Features = More New Opportunities
What Apple, and many others are failing to understand is this: The more new stuff you add to iOS, the more opportunities there are to improve or alter the experience.
Take iCloud for example. Wonderful idea, but its use is obviously restricted to whatever Apple deems necessary.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you had a PKGBackup like utility that backed up to iCloud, instead of to some 3rd party service like DropBox? How incredible would that be? How easy would that make restoring your iPhone just the way you like it?
And that, folks, is just the tip of the iceberg…
According to the screenshot from Apple’s iOS 5 section of their website, the new and improved OS has over 200 new features. Now lets say a mere 10% of those could realistically be improved or altered in some way, shape, or form, by individuals in the jailbreak community.
That’s over 20 new jailbreak apps or tweaks, and we’re not even considering multiple varieties or iterations of the same tweak or app.
It would’ve been one thing if Apple’s tried to curb jailbreaking by only adding tools that jailbreaking provided, but as with all major iOS updates, they’ve added a plethora of new features — features that are just dying to be customized and tailored to our specific needs.
For that reason alone, I’d say that there’s no way that iOS 5 curbs jailbreaking as much as Apple might hope it will. Sure notification center, and Wi-Fi Sync may convince a few people to stay stock this go around, but it surely won’t convince all.
In fact, I’d say with all of the cool stuff that’s bound to be created in the future, jailbreaking could actually gain in popularity after iOS 5 is released.
What do you say?