Jailbreaking your iPhone isn’t illegal, but it doesn’t mean Apple has to like it. In fact, they outright hate it. With each update, they make it more and more difficult for the talented community to release a successful jailbreaking tool. I’m sure I’m not the only one patiently awaiting the next untethered version.
One tool Apple has developed to thwart jailbreak users is to create apps that recognize a modified handset when installed via iTunes. Upon opening such apps, an alert will appear on your screen:
“Jailbreak detected. App cannot run on a jailbroken device.”
The user will then have no choice but to either restore their device to a non-jailbroken state or go without using the specific app. Bummer.
Luckily, a recent tweak submitted to Cydia by the name of xCon attempts to bypass the issue. The tweak is free of charge but allows the workaround on only a few apps. The short list currently supports the following applications:
- Bloomberg Anywhere
- Cablevision
- Cisco M-Learning
- DirecTV for iPad
- Grimm’s Fairy Tales
- Time Warner Cable
- Verizon On Demand /FlexView
The tweak works by sandboxing the apps into its own memory space allowing you to use them without a jailbreak being detected. Although the exact process isn’t explained, I’m sure Apple is now considering ways to outdate the tweak. The cat and mouse game is far from over.
The developer behind the tweak promises more apps to be supported in the future. He also welcomes special requests:
You can help! If you have an app not yet supported by xCon, please email me (n00neimp0rtant@me.com) the name of the application and I will do my best to get it patched. I can’t guarantee every app can be patched, but most of them can.
Be sure of one thing: Apple will continue to dish out service updates attempting to prevent jailbreak efforts on their products. After all, jailbreaking is possible due to security holes, such as the PDF exploit Comex used with this famous browser jailbreak. He now has an internship with Apple, by the way.
You will obviously need to have a jailbroken device to get it to work. For jailbreaking iOS 5 tethered using Redsn0w, you can follow our complete step by step guide posted here, or here if you want to use Sn0wbreeze on Windows. Since jailbreak on iOS 5 is currently limited to tethered boot only, you can install ‘SemiTether’ patch (instructions here) from Cydia to make your jailbreak semi-tethered on iOS 5. For those of you on iOS 5.0.1 can follow our instructions posted here on how to jailbreak using Redsn0w, or here using Ac1dSn0w, or here using Sn0wbreeze.
For now, the tweak will work with the listed apps, more to be added later. You can find xCon by searching in Cydia in the ModMyi repo.
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