iPhone OS 2.0 unlocked but tool not yet available

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Saturday, 12 July 2008 12:09

Your IT - Mobility

From the screenshots at the iPhone Dev Team blog in the “Living in Sweet Harmony” post, you can see that the Installer.app and Cydia app are listed as on screen, which indicates that third party unauthorised software can work alongside authorised apps.

This will bring out the best of both worlds, authorised and unauthorised, but clearly most developers with a popular unauthorised app will want the widest possible audience and will thus take their app to the official App Store, and earn some money from it too, if they can.

Just how popular unauthorised application creation will remain is is yet to be seen, but unauthorised apps will feature those that Apple specifically disallows, such as VoIP apps that work over 3G instead of just Wi-Fi and others.

For many the unlock tool will only be used to allow other SIM cards to be installed when travelling, because the App Store fixes for many the problem of no additional software.

How Apple chooses to lock down the next iPhone 2.x firmware is yet to be seen, although the iPhone Dev Team previously claimed that their new unlock was expected to be very hard for Apple to get around.

Even if Apple did manage to make any new iPhone 2.x firmware/software locked once more, it would clearly only embolden the hackers to try even harder, so this cat and mouse game of lock and unlock seems set to continue for as long as Apple and the hackers are around.

So, if you’ve got an original iPhone 2G and want to install the new software but also unlock it, you’ll need some extra patience. We’ve waited this long, what’s a few more days?

Yep, more torture. But it will be worth the wait!