Launching QuickPwn 2.2.5 to Jailbreak my iPhone

First of all, try to understand that with new barriers inserted in every software update (you’ll have to hold off on each iPhone upgrade until there is a jailbreak released specifically for it) — and Apple even attempting to make it illegal to do it in the States of America — providing jailbreaking tools for the iPhone isn’t a business with a huge growth trajectory. The people who bring us this crack and the maverick apps it enables are ‘deep geeks’ who are likely doing this out of twin loves for their phones and for their freedom. They don’t have vast user interface teams. And they are prone to overlooking simple but potentially very alienating holes in the experience of a first-time jailbreaker, such as littering their docs and screens with a word like ‘Springboard‘, it never seeming to occur to any of them that many iPhone users coming out of a jailbreak still don’t know what that is. (It’s Apple’s internal name for the application that creates your swipeable ‘home screen’.) Forgive them, for they are doing it all themselves and their internal editors are probably already overbooked resisting the urge to insert UNIX commands into everyday conversation.

So, this warning they have just levelled at you, is not meant to scare you off at all, nor does it mean that jailbreaking is some unpredictable timebomb. It is simply meant to make you proceed very, very carefully, and without failing to understand a single word of instruction. It’s oddly adversarial, I know, but in the push-and-pull between the ‘developer’ of a program here, and its users, the convention has been for the developer to provide explicit instructions alongside every application, and then for all the users to ignore those instructions and to instead judge the work, as one might reasonably expect, on its own merits. Jailbroken applications tend to hold up fine without reading the dox, and you can generally relax once you’re past the guard tower, as it were. But the jailbreak itself, is not to be trifled with.

You’ll encounter this rigorous prescription only in what they classify here as ‘technology’. (You won’t be encountering any novelists writing instruction booklets for exactly how to experience their work, for example.) Try to inscribe a map in your brain of every idiosyncratic double standard that crosses your path. This is a ‘strongly-typed‘ society — you need to become more ‘type-aware’ in order to survive in it. Just don’t ‘drink the kool-aid’, as they say, for if you become an actual believer in these arbitrary types, they will dice you into a cubelet of what you could have been, and prevent you from ever leaving your narrowest timeline, in the end.

In any case, the developers here are just trying to pin their work squarely within the ‘technology type’ and to make sure you know that there is a need for it. TAKE THEM SERIOUSLY. This is not the time to assume that you can rely on this world’s conventional approach to documentation. Go to this official page of the iPhone jailbreaking team. Look for ‘QuickPwn Release Info’. And read it, word-for-word, before you do anything, even if you do use my posts here as a glimpse into the process. Which brings me to this, I think prudent, disclaimer…

*** These observations only apply to the iPhone 3G and are not intended as a replacement for reading any of this ***

LATER: CHEAT SHEETS FOR THE QUICKPWN DIALOGS

[Submitted by The Laroquod Experiment.]