iPhone Dev Team: No More Jailbreaks

A few weeks ago, the iPhone Dev Team came out with a very easy way to jailbreak the iPhone by exploiting a Safari vulnerability. Apple almost immediately pushed out a patch to fix this. On their blog, the team has confirmed that they will not release an update of their jailbreak to counter the new firmware, and will not be taking on Apple anymore:

"FW 4.0.2/3.2.2 was *only* released to fix the jailbreakme hole."

"With FW 4.1 still in its beta stages, it makes no sense to escalate the "cat & mouse" with Apple for FW updates that only fix the jailbreak holes. To quote WOPR, "the only winning move is not to play... If the cat & mouse game escalates too quickly, especially during beta FW periods, nobody but Apple benefits. For this reason, there won't be a 4.0.2/3.2.2 jailbreak specifically during the period where 4.0.2/3.2.2 is the latest public release."

In my eyes, this is a Pyrrhic victory for Apple. They've shown their hand: the ONLY thing that they care about is keeping the profitability of their walled iPhone and other gardens. That Safari bug was BAD; remote control of your phone, a dodgy site away? Yet the only reason it was even patched was not because it was a bad issue, but it was a bad issue that allowed iPhone users to jailbreak their phones.

This isn't new; Apple has never been transparent about what's in their patches and what they fix. This is the same thing they've done with their music DRM; the moment someone would crack the DRM, a fix would be out a day later. Even the latest batch of OSX patches addresses issues with particular open source software that most Linux distributions addressed when they became known, in most cases months ago.

So congratulations, Apple. Your concern for nothing more than the bottom line has led you to beat down another group of jailbreakers. Be proud. As for me, I think it's time to start shopping for a Droid.