What Happened to All the iPhone Jailbreaking?

When was the last time you heard about someone “jailbreaking” their iPhone? When was the last time you thought about doing it? While jailbreaking still happens,and some hackers still work on removing the guardrails from iOS devices, it’s not nearly as common as it once was.

Why? Did Apple’s walled garden become any less walled-in? Did people stop caring? Maybe it’s just too difficult now. All of these play some part in the final answer, but I think the decline of jailbreaking culture is a little more nuanced than that.

The Golden Age of Jailbreaking

In the earliest days of the iPhone, Apple’s polished smartphone was surprisingly barebones. There was no App Store, no copy-and-paste, no widgets, and very little room for customization. Jailbreaking changed all that.

If you break the locks on your iPhone, you could get access to settings that were usually hidden from regular users. Not only that, but you could access Cydia, an unofficial app store that offered just about anything you could want. Sure, it enabled piracy since you could find any paid app and install it for free. However, the main appeal was the homebrew apps that let you install themes, customizations and tweaks, and software (like emulators) that Apple would not approve for its official app store.

While jailbreaking came with some very real risks (and a voided warranty), lots of people were doing it. It was never entirely mainstream, but certainly among more technically-literate people it wasn’t uncommon in my experience.

Apple’s Counterattack

Apple wasn’t going to let users run unsigned code forever. With each new iOS update, jailbreak exploits were patched, often within days. The company kept adding new hardware and software features to make its devices more secure.

There were also legal rumblings and threats of voided warranties or major security vulnerabilities to dissuade more casual iPhone owners from trying to jailbreak their devices. In retrospect, this wasn’t just FUD from Apple. While it was rare, you really could brick your iPhone, lose your data, or fall victim to hacking and malware if you wandered outside the safety of the walled garden. Still, for a lot of people, it was totally worth the risk to gain so much control of their device.

Technical Barriers Made Jailbreaking Impractical

As of this writing, the latest version of iOS is 18, and there is no jailbreak for it as far as I can see. There’s no total jailbreak for iOS 17 either, and iOS 16 is the last version to currently have a “proper” jailbreak based on my limited research. Now, when jailbreaking was more common, it was normal to be a version behind as jailbreakers worked on cracking the latest version of iOS, but jailbreaking became more and more tedious the more Apple worked against it.

For example, later jailbreaks were “tethered” which means you had to reapply them every time your phone restarted. Some jailbreaks relied on weird exploits that were quickly patched, and some required risky “downgrading” to work.

Apple Gave People What They Wanted

In the end, it turns out the best way to reduce the desire to jailbreak an iPhone or other iOS-based device is to give people official features that needed a jailbreak in the past.

Apple got plenty of ideas from the most popular tweaks that were jailbreak-exclusives before. Dark modes, screen recording, widgets, and more are now just part of stock iOS. As I write this, iOS 26 is still coming, but one of its biggest features is a massively expanded set of customizations, so you can make your iPhone much more personal—for better or worse. Likewise, we now have subscription services for games, which means piracy has a much weaker incentive.

Apple is also allowing apps in its store that it would never have before. Chief among these are video game emulators, which were never illegal, but nonetheless something Apple didn’t want to touch. No more!

Apple may have taken its time on some of these features and services, but the truth is that there’s little to justify the risk of jailbreaking these days.

Jailbreaking’s Legacy and Afterlife

Mainstream jailbreaking may be dead, but its influence is everywhere. iOS today is shaped by features that originated in the jailbreak community, from multitasking to UI customization and beyond. We actually owe the jailbreaking community a lot, if you ask me. And the story may not be completely over. In regions like the EU, new laws such as the Digital Markets Act are pushing Apple to allow sideloading and third-party app stores—concepts that jailbreaking pioneered.

In the end, jailbreaking didn’t just die. It won! Apple absorbed the best ideas, legitimized them, and left the underground scene to fade away. Even Android’s similar practice of “rooting” seems to have faded to a mere ebb, so I do wonder if we’ll ever see something like the golden age of jailbreaking again.