Kids these days will never know the struggle of jailbreaking an iPhone just to get the most obvious features Apple refused to ship.
Jailbreaking an iPhone was Huge Back in the Day – It All Came to an End and We Never Realized it
Jailbreaking was way too mainstream back in the day. It was the go-to thing if you wanted to add a toggle switch to turn on Wi-Fi from the Home Screen, change the color of icons, install a system-wide theme, or even install apps Apple would not allow on the App Store. It was all over the place and the community loved it.
I clearly remember the day I decided to jailbreak my iPhone. It was an iPhone 4, the tool I used was Redsn0w and it took about 20 minutes in total to get from jailbreaking to installing Cydia. When I was done, I had never seen anything quite like it. You had to add repositories to install ‘tweaks’ that made iOS way better in a lot of ways.
The most popular repository was BigBoss. Once added, you got access to countless tweaks and packages. Activator was one of the most popular ones and it was straight up genius. It allowed the user to assign swipe or tap gestures to launch an action. For example, swiping up from the Home Screen would launch a certain app. Or, you could set the Home button to do something – press on it three times and boom, you’re taking a screenshot or launching the Messages app. Want to send a tweet from anywhere in iOS? Activator allowed you to do that and countless other things.
There were tweaks like Accentify that would allow you to change the accent color of iOS. Don’t like the blue look? Make it red, green, orange, you name it. I can keep on going for hours, but it would just bore you.
In plain words – jaibreaking an iPhone would allow developers to fill a huge void that Apple left in terms of features.
Then it all went away.
Over time, Apple went hard against jailbreaking. Hardware and software changes made jailbreaking harder, essentially destroying the entire practice until almost nothing was left. Every single thing you could get by jailbreaking was now a stock iOS feature. For example, Control Center brought quick toggle switches to iOS, Notification Center gave notifications a proper home and so much more.
Like it or not, but the jailbreak community shaped up the iPhone in a lot of ways. All those weird and wonderful features in iOS we see today, there was a jailbreak tweak for that.
