Paul Morris on January 27, 2018, 1:18 am

Major Throwback: When MuscleNerd Interviewed Saurik, And When Jailbreaks For New iOS Updates Took “A Few Days”

It’s extremely easy for all of us to live in the here and now. Our day-to-day routine generally consumes us and takes up a lot of our time, making it very difficult to take a step back and breathe in some history.

The jailbreak community is still thriving, but it doesn’t take a technology historian to understand that it simply isn’t as free-flowing and robust as it used to be once, as this nearly seven-year-old video interview with Jay “saurik” Freeman shows.

Newcomers into the jailbreak community could be forgiven for thinking that it has always been the way it is now and that this is the best that they can hope for. The current security restraints in place on Apple’s devices makes it extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to jailbreak devices easily. However, back in the good old days, it was actually possible to have a functional jailbreak tool out into the wider community just “a few days” after Apple bundled a new version of iOS. Sure, Apple’s firmware was easier to hack back in those days, but we also had a significant talent pool of individuals working tirelessly to liberate devices and make jailbreaks public. Sadly, those days are gone, but it’s still full to reminisce.

In this particular interview taken by MuscleNerd (of Redsn0w fame) of iPhone Dev-Team back in year 2011, Jay Freeman, a.k.a saurik takes the opportunity to introduce himself as the creator of Cydia – the App Store alternative for jailbroken devices – before giving a demonstration of a number of popular packages for those devices at the time. Those packages are shown off as main reasons why an individual may want to actually jailbreak an Apple device in order to customize and configure the experience to his/her needs using previously unapproved third-party installations.

Some of the tweak installations shown off by Saurik in the video include Five Icon Dock, Barrel, SBSettings, Graviboard, CUPS HD WinterBoard theme, and Voicemail Forwarder which allowed a user to send voicemails as email attachments. Freeman also talks rather casually about the advice given to users back in the day of holding off on updating to new firmware for just a few days before a new jailbreak comes out to support that new version of iOS. Unfortunately, iOS device owners these days have to wait for more than a year for that to happen.

Finally, we also get to see a conversation with Britta who used to work on Cydia from a community perspective until she resigned, which Freeman took the opportunity to highlight the main reasons at the backend of last year.

If you’re a lover of jailbreaking, then you really need to spend five minutes and watch this blast from the past.