Jailbreak

Or they also want it to test the unbreakability of the iPhone’s activation mechanism. This mechanism allows the phone to be activated only with an AT&T SIM card. And it’s a battle of wits. The first success is credited to the popular “DVD Jon” - the young man who broke DVD encryption - and on July 3, he breaks the phone’s protection. However, the procedure is not yet very intuitive and allows the phone to be used without a SIM card, but not with another SIM card.

Six days later, the iPhone Dev Team came up with a jailbreak method, and this word soon became synonymous with breaking Apple’s phone security. The first use of jailbreak? It is not yet possible to use a different SIM card, but you can activate a ringtone that you did not purchase. It wasn’t until the end of July that the first hardware methods for bypassing AT&T SIM cards appeared, and it is noteworthy that one of the methods is SIM card virtualization from the Czech company Bladox. However, neither this procedure nor soldering on the iPhone motherboard is considered a real victory by the community; only a purely software breakthrough can be considered as such. This is achieved in mid-September, when IPSF releases paid software for unlocking the phone, and a day later, the iPhone Dev Team releases the first free iUnlock software. The unlocking process is reminiscent of the “golden age of hacking” and consists of uploading the code to the phone via activated SSH, renaming it to an image, and launching this image via Safari, which executes the code. Well, nostalgia.

Apple is expected to put a stop to hackers because it has relatively many options to make their lives difficult and eliminate jailbreaking. It is worth noting that the company has never done so, only later adding jailbreak detection to the development environment so that developers could determine whether a phone was jailbroken and act accordingly. There is a reason for this: for example, banking apps need to know that there is no malicious software running in the background that could alter their commands, which is ensured by non-jailbroken phones.

With the arrival of new software updates, there is always a race to see which team will be the first to release a more convenient method of jailbreaking and unlocking the phone. Next time, it won’t take more than a few days, and the unlocking software will be available before Apple’s software update.

And speaking of software installation, the first unofficial options for conveniently installing software on the iPhone appeared in August. On August 21, 2007, Nullriver released the first graphical application, Installer.app, which allowed users to activate, download, and install native software on the iPhone. For many users, this will be a reason to jailbreak their phones, and the rapidly growing number of jailbreaks will be an argument for Apple to create its own App Store and offer the option to officially install native third-party applications. Apple confirms the development of its own SDK and interface for third parties in a statement on October 17, 2007, and releases the first beta version in March 2008, when it also officially names the iPhone operating system iPhone OS.

In September, Jobs discontinues the lowest-end version with 4GB of memory and decides to radically reduce the price of the iPhone by $200 with a two-year contract with AT&T, instantly turning a very expensive phone into a very affordable one. The 8GB version of the iPhone now costs only $399 instead of $599. The phone’s price changed so radically after only 66 days on the market, which is simply not done. Those who had already bought it were rightly upset.

Jobs explains that he wanted to lower the price of the phone before the Christmas shopping season so that potential buyers would not hesitate to purchase such a groundbreaking product because of the price, but he cannot ignore the voices of angry customers who complain about Jobs’ “tax on stupid impulse buying.” A day later, Jobs backs down and offers everyone who bought the phone at the original price a $100 credit to spend in the Apple Store. The scandal is averted by a quick and prudent decision, and Jobs learns one thing: it’s good to act quickly, even if it seems expensive at first glance. He would use this experience again in the case of Antennagate, when the launch of the iPhone 4 revealed that the phone lost signal significantly when held in a certain way. After a brief dance of excuses, Apple promptly offered a free case that would solve the problem.

In November 2007, the iPhone officially launched in the UK, France, and Germany, and a software update made it possible to turn off automatic typo corrections while typing without having to jailbreak the phone. This was the thing that had annoyed users of gray-market iPhones the most, but at that time, even a phone without jailbreaking did not work outside the AT&T network, so all jailbreaking utilities already included the activation of the correction switch. Now Apple is officially adding it along with regional support.

By the end of 2007, Apple had sold a total of 3,704,000 iPhones in all four markets, which, considering that the phone was only on sale for 186 days that year, represents an average of 20,000 phones sold every day. And it turns out that Jobs’s prediction was correct: sales of the iPhone doubled in September with a $200 price reduction, accelerating the platform’s winning streak. However, in order for the iPhone to continue to shine, it needed to catch up technologically, i.e., include 3G support as a matter of course. In 2007, this was still tolerable at a time when AT&T was just beginning to expand its 3G network and the iPhone was practically not sold on other networks, so 3G usage was minimal, but with the arrival of the phone on European operators’ networks and the gradual improvement of the AT&T network, 3G was already a necessity.

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Jailbreak

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