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reacharavindh • today at 4:52 PM • 6 replies • view on HN

It’s a pity we gave in to the “ecosystem” play by these huge companies.. even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such. iPhone would be one glorious iPod touch after that.. :-(

Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware… I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…


Replies

ValentineC • today at 6:16 PM

> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.. Apple can easily detect the jailbreak and lock me out of anything iCloud, and iMessage and such.

As someone who's been jailbreaking since the iPhone 3GS (and held onto a iOS 17.0 device for the longest time), Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.

If anything, it's those sleazy security framework providers that provide jailbreak detection to apps and cause them to either lock people out of accounts and features, or crash entirely.

Some government-mandated audit processes (at least, that's what I understand here in Singapore) also require jailbreak detection.

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rootnod3 • today at 5:17 PM

Vote with your wallet. Fuck them.

You shouldn’t have to use LLMs to run your software.

Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.

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roosterIllusi0n • today at 5:44 PM

Can't anyone customize the source of grapheneOS and simultaneously get a phone that is not trying to disable itself?

tw600040 • today at 5:24 PM

You do understand the reasons right? iCloud, iMessages etc are an interplay of software in your device, software in cloud and some networking. They have to work together. A jailbroken phone can have a tinkered iMessage app. Supporting tinkered / unsupported versions is more overhead / possible security risk. Why would you expect them to take on that?

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traceroute66 • today at 5:11 PM

> even if I jailbreak my iOS and never let it update.

Two things:

a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?

b) I understand the perspective of people insisting on wanting to be able to root their phone. But how about we take a step back and look at the reality of the 2026 security environment ? An environment where you have:

     - Increasing volumes of increasingly sneaky security exploits on one side
     - A phone with your 2FA apps, your banking apps, your email apps, your kids photos on the other
Frankly. I want Apple to lock down my iPhone as much as possible in that context.

If I want to be root, I can do so on my desktop or a cloud VM or whatever.

But making root on a phone easy just seems like a recipe for disaster... if its easy for you, its easy for the bad guys too.

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tsunamifury • today at 5:17 PM

We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build.

1) They of course lack the resources

2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required

3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed.

4) The release schedule is laughable at best.

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