It’s been 347 days since the last jailbreak for iOS was released. And according to the guys that originally made jailbreaking a huge craze, you shouldn’t get your hopes up on jailbreaking your iPhone ever again.

In fact, even if you could jailbreak iOS 10, Jay Freeman — the guy that invented Cydia, which was the App Store before the App Store was the App Store — says you shouldn’t.

Jailbreaking is officially dead.

In a great article detailing the rise of jailbreaking alongside the original iPhone, Motherboard got in touch with jailbreaking pioneers such as Nicholas Allegra, Jay Freeman and Michael Wang to reveal the lengths they went through to break into Apple’s walled garden for the good of all iPhone owners.

“I feel like jailbreak’s basically dead at this point,” Nicholas Allegra told site. Revitalizing the jailbreaking scene would take a great rising hacker, but the most promising one, Luca Todesco, announced this year that he’s quitting.

When the iPhone came out 10 years ago it didn’t have third-party apps. It didn’t even have a game. But thanks to jailbreakers like comex (Nicholas Allegra), the iPhone Dev Team (not affiliated with Apple) and Saurik (Jay Freeman), Apple’s capable smartphone was pushed to the limits as owners were allowed to install third-party apps and tweaks without Apple’s permission.

New jailbreaks used to be released within months of each other during the prime of Apple’s cat vs mouse game with developers. Now the iPhone’s security has become so locked down, it takes several valuable exploits to pull off a complete jailbreak and there’s little payoff for users.

Don’t Jailbreak

“What do you get in the end?” Jay Freeman asks Motherboard in the interview. “It used to be that you got killer features that almost were the reason you owned the phone. And now you get a small minor modification.”

The death of jailbreaking has been caused by a four things of things: 1) Apple’s increased security has made it harder, 2) If a hacker does find a vulnerability they can make up to $1 million selling it. 3) Most of the best jailbreakers have moved onto high paying security jobs. 4) If you can jailbreak an iPhone, you’re exposing it to security vulnerabilities.

“That turns into, like, a death spiral, where when you get fewer people bothering to jailbreak you get fewer developers targeting interesting things, which means there’s less reasons for people to jailbreak,” Freeman says. “Which means there’s fewer people jailbreaking, which causes there to be less developers bothering to target it. And then you slowly die.”

Soure: cult of mac