The iPhone User Guide

At iPhoneUserGuide we are finding more and more apps simply crash or don’t work as they should with Jailbroken devices… Facebook bombs out constantly, Skype simply won’t work and we’re also finding a lot of games are not performing like they should…

Is jailbreaking REALLY necessary any more? That’s another discussion… however developers are now hitting back at the complaints from users… Strange Flavour are the makers of Warpack: Grunts, and this is what they have to say:

We had a big problem on the launch of Warpack: Grunts when it turned out that some players who had Jailbroken their devices were getting crashes at the start of the game. Obviously this got us a whole bunch of bad reviews. Very very few of them mentioning that actually, they’d broken their phone. I also had quite a few emails from Jailbreak users asking if we were doing it deliberately and when would we fix it. So I’d like to clarify a few things. Firstly, there was no deliberate attempt to block jailbroken devices or mess with them. The bug is entirely in the jailbreak software itself which obviously has a glitch that’s causing the problem. Whatever it is, it causes Grunts to crash on some devices when installed after the jailbreak takes place (one fix is to install it first, then jailbreak). It happens that Grunts is one of very few apps that shows this bug in the jailbreak software at the moment, but the bug’s there and will probably cause you other problems at some point. Secondly, the problem is, there’s absolutely nothing we can do to fix this problem. Grunts is written as an iPhone OS application and has no problems when tested against a real iPhone or iPod Touch. Jailbroken users have to understand that when you jailbreak, you are modifying your device and no longer benefit from the concept of a standard devices that apps can be tested on. So it’s entirely up to you as a jailbreak user to fix any issues it may cause. We had a big discussion after this problem came up about what to do for future builds. We ruled out testing against jailbroken phones because there’s no way to do it properly. The very nature of hacking an iPhone device makes it an untestable entity. Each one is done differently (that’s kind of the point) and none follow any standards. If we added a whole suite of tests and modifications to suit jailbroken devices, we’d use up time we could use a lot more productively to work on updates for the users who haven’t broken their phones and new games. We also discussed possibly blocking jailbroken users as a future policy. For the moment we ruled that out too, as jailbroken users are about 12% of our legitimate users (they’re around 25% of them as far as stats are concerned, but half of those stole the games so we don’t care about them). This is a policy we’ll be monitoring as things go on though. If there’s a 10% chance that any game that’s released will get a chunk of bad reviews because a section of players have installed something else that randomly breaks stuff then we may have to reconsider this policy. So, Jailbroken users. Please remember that your iPhone or iPod isn’t a standard one, we don’t mind that. But if your non standard installation is causing you problems, it’s up to you (and the jailbreaking community) to fix the problem.

The dev team report: ultrasn0w version 0.9 is out! We believe it solves pretty much all of the various random issues that have been reported. Its features include:

• Works on both 3G and 3GS
• Works on hacktivated devices
• Works regardless of how you jailbroke your device
• Doesn’t patch any mach-o binary whatsoever. (Doesn’t require a separate patch as each new firmware comes out).
• Doesn’t install any additional daemon
• Has no race conditions, no popups about “Missing SIM”, no network issues
• Is almost 7000 times smaller than its nearest competition
• Is available now via Cydia. Source repo is http://repo666.ultrasn0w.com (that last “0” in ultrasn0w is a zero!)

It looks like we’ll all be able to unlock and jailbreak our iPhones from Wednesday morning. Latest news from the iPhone Dev Team:

As anyone reading this blog must already know, this is the big week where Apple releases their official 3.0 FW to the public (Wednesday), and then the new iPhone2,1 hardware, aka the iPhone 3GS (Friday).

On Tuesday evening (just before the big Apple release) we’ll do a live demo of the yellowsn0w carrier unlock working on official 3.0 firmware.   The actual link for the feed will be twittered by @MuscleNerd (see our twitter feeds to the right) and also placed here when the feed starts. The demo should answer everything you need to know about the new yellowsn0w. But it’s good news for iPhone 3G unlockers everywhere.

Meanwhile, we’re in the middle of testing our PwnageTool and QuickPwn tools, which will work with iTunes 8.2. The jailbreak of course continues to work on 3.0 for all devices it ever worked on, thanks due the Pwnage 2.0 technique released last summer. Our tools will be released no sooner than the Apple release (just in case!).

P.S. For the new iPhone 3GS, please don’t expect periodic updates about any progress we have or don’t have. Nothing gives Apple the upper hand like someone tweeting or blogging partial hack results. That’s not how cat & mouse is played That’s how the cat gets fed.

Available to Jailbroken iPhone users, MacOrb replaces the ‘square’ icons with circular ones, and they are all nice and glossy! Download it from Cydia now for free.

After releasing PwnageTool 2.2.5 and QuickPwn 2.2.5 for iPhone firmware 2.2.1 for Mac users earlier in the day, the iPhone Dev team has just released QuickPwn 2.2.5-2 for Windows users. The QuickPwn tool can be used to jailbreak and unlock 1st Gen iPhone and only jailbreak iPhone 3G. But using QuickPwn or the upgrading to iPhone Firmware 2.2.1 from iTunes will re-lock your iPhone 3G. So iPhone 3G users should use QuickPwn 2.2.5-2 if you DON’T care about unlocking and want to ONLY jailbreak your iPhone 3G.

This was posted on iPhone Dev Team’s blog this weekend, just days after the 2.2.1 software came out, they’ve cracked it, however you MUST read the full details if you want to upgrade and jailbreak on 2.2.1.

Details below:

This is the low down on our tools for use with the 2.2.1 firmare from Apple, read the whole post in full before attempting anything. Please note that the Windows version of QuickPwn has been updated to version 2.2.5-2

1. GOLDEN RULE: If you have a 3G iPhone running 2.2 firmware and you want to keep your ability to use yellowns0w (or the option to use it in the future) do NOT use QuickPwn, and do not use the official ipsw or the iTunes update process without using PwnageTool.
2. Yellowsn0w will NOT work with the baseband version (02.30.03) that is present in the recent 2.2.1 update. If you want to use Yellownsn0w you will need to create and restore using a custom .ipsw that will allow you to update safely to 2.2.1 without applying the 02.30.03 baseband update. You’ll then have a 3G iPhone running 2.2.1 with an older baseband version that is still vulnerable to yellowsn0w, following these steps ensures that yellowsn0w will still operate.
   
3. Please read all parts of this post before downloading and using these tools.
4. Read items 1, 2 and 3 again and again.
5. At the bottom of this post are the bittorrent files for the latest versions of PwnageTool and QuickPwn.
6. These apps are suitable for the recent 2.2.1 release.
7. The Yellowsn0w version has been updated to 0.9.7. Yellowsn0w is available from Cydia or Installer – this version allows compatibility with pwned 2.2.1 system (not baseband). Again„ remember 0.9.7 yellowsn0w DOES NOT WORK WITH 2.2.1 (02.30.03) directly – you need to be running a ‘pwned’ version of 2.2.1 which didn’t upgrade the baseband during the restore/upgrade.
8. Users of OS X 10.5.6 will be unable to use DFU mode correctly, please see the note towards the end of this post to easily fix this issue.

The full details for your specific device can be found by viewing more of this article

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There is an iPhone and iPod update available in iTunes – it is numbered 2.2.1 (5H11a). Please DO NOT update. We will investigate and report back to you ASAP.