Pros and Cons Of Jailbreaking Your Iphone

Apple products are very popular with most of their users but the restrictions that the company puts on its operating system is frustrating to some. Although you can get most apps on the Apple store, there are some that aren’t available, and some people just don’t want to pay for them.

It is also notoriously difficult to personalise the user interface and change default programs like Mail and Safari. Since the first Iphone was released in 2007, users have been getting around this by Jailbreaking their devices.

What is Jailbreaking?

In short, Jailbreaking removes a lot of the restrictions that Apple put on the phone, allowing you to change the user interface and install apps from other stores or directly from the internet. Since the beginning, Apple have been trying to stop their users from doing this but, so far, they have not been successful. For a step by step guide on how to jailbreak your own phone, click here.

Pros

There are a lot of benefits to jailbreaking your Iphone. You will be able to load a different operating system onto it which you may prefer to IOS. Even if you decide to keep the original operating system, you will have much more freedom to customize the look and functionality of it to suit your own needs. 

If you have an older device, you can tweak the operating system to include features that were only released on the latest operating system. For example, the hard press function which brings up a secondary menu when you press for a few seconds, can now be loaded onto almost any jailbroken Iphone. This is very handy for people that cannot afford the latest Iphone.

You will also have access to a much wider range of apps, many of which you can get for free. Activator is a brilliant app that lets you assign different functions to certain gestures on the touch screen. 

For example you can open a certain app by assigning a three finger swipe to it. There also countless games and entertainment apps you can get for free.  

Apps such as Moviebox give you completely free access to thousands of movies and tv shows wherever you are. If you know you won’t have an internet connection then you can also download movies onto the phone for later.

Cons

Unfortunately jailbreaking isn’t all plain sailing. As soon as you jailbreak your Iphone, the warranty is voided. If anything goes wrong with it, the Apple store will not fix or replace it for you. You can get round this by backing up the data and restoring it to it’s unjailbroken state before you take it in. It’s a good idea to back up before you jailbreak anyway, in case anything goes wrong and you lose all of your data.

Jailbreaking can also open you up to hackers. While most of the apps are safe, some can contain dangerous malware and without a lot of the built in security features you get with IOS, you’re phone is a lot less secure. 

If you are dead set on jailbreaking your Iphone, then always make sure you back-up first, and when you are downloading apps, check online to see if anybody else has had problems with them.