Late 2011 was when I first used an iPhone. It was an iPhone 3G and I soon found out it wasn’t as fun to use as the Nokia Symbian phone I was using, a Nokia N95. I ran several searches on Google, and learned I could actually jailbreak the device to get some freedom.
I did. That was years ago and right till this day, I still jailbreak my devices. I currently own an iPhone 6s Plus and an iPad Air 2 which are both jailbroken. Of course, a lot of reasons people jailbreak for back in the days are no longer valid as Apple itself took (or stole) a lot of ideas from the jailbreak community and Android OS. Things like SB Settings are no longer needed, Apple also came up with Night Shift, rendering f.lux useless.
Do you really still need to jailbreak?
Things like these make jailbreaking your device look unnecessary, but is this really the case? A lot of people now jailbreak for aesthetics, tweaks like Springtomize 3 gives your homescreen a better look and there are several themes in Cydia to change the way your device appear. However, there are more.
For instance, I use Spotify (with VPN of course) but the annoying limitations imposed on free accounts can drive you nuts. I only need to install Spotify4all to remove the forced tracks randomization and get unlimited skips. There are times I need to fake my location too and tweaks like LocationFaker come in handy. I now play Pokemon Go sitting on my ass and walking the the streets of New York thanks to Pokemon Go ++ Cydia tweak. You see, jailbreaking your iPhone isn’t just all about getting paid apps for free from 25PP and AppCake.
Why are people scared to jailbreak then?
Over the last five years, jailbreaking iOS has never killed any of my devices. Right from the days of iOS 4 on iPhone 3G when this was done through Redsn0w to iOS 9 where Pangu is now the MVP, jailbreaking iOS hasn’t really been particularly harmful. This doesn’t mean it is completely harmless though.
The fact that you’re gonna lose your warranty remains true. However, a restore through iTunes nullifies this. The chance that you’re going to brick your device while jailbreaking is very slim. What is more likely to brick your iPhone is an old or incompatible Cydia tweak. Again, simply going to safe mode and removing the tweak or doing an iTunes restore solves this.
Being also too adventurous by unnecessarily modifying system files when you’re not really sure of what you’re doing can land you into trouble, but as usual, this is normally solved by going to DFU mode and doing a full restore.
You see, it’s a thing not to like jailbreaking your device and it’s another thing being scared to do it. The choice is yours at the end of the day though.