Jailbreak iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Apple reportedly asked Toyota to remove from Cydia its exclusive theme created by Toyota’s advertising company Velti for promotion of its new vehicle and available for jailbroken iPhones.

Scion, a brand of vehicles manufactured by Toyota, recently developed a custom iPhone theme specifically for jailbroken devices, submitting it to us for hosting in Cydia.

As far as we know, Apple is strongly against jailbroken devices but this advertising campaign may somehow help to legitimize the jailbreak community and also place it in direct competition with Apple’s own iAds network. Apple apparently heard about the campaign and has asked Toyota to pull it.

I received a call from our contact at Velti this evening as well as an email asking me to please take the theme out of Cydia. On the phone, he explained Apple had contacted Toyota and requested they remove the theme and stop the advertising campaign. They (Velti) in turn contacted me relaying the message. The reason Velti listed for the removal request of the theme emailed through our dev portal was “Toyota’s making us take it down” Toyota had agreed to do so to “maintain their good relationship with Apple,” our Velti contact told me on the phone.

Apple seems really dislike everything that helps users to jailbreak their devices. This time Apple blocked access to the Cydia website via Wi-Fi network in Apple retail stores. If you try accessing Cydia on a device connected to one of Apple’s Wi-Fi hotspots, you’ll be surprised to see Apple’s website load instead. As far as we remember, last year federal regulators said that it was no longer illegal to hack or jailbreak an iPhone. However, Apple doesn’t care about that and continues its “war” with jailbroken devices.

It seems that the recently released iPad 2 has been jailbroken. iOS hacker, known as Comex,  posted on his Twitter account that the iPad 2 jailbreak is underway. The Jailbreak has yet to be packaged. Comex has yet to say when the jailbreak will made public, and how it works, but we now at least know the iPad 2 is able to be jailbroken. On the shot above you may see the proof – the jailbroken white iPad 2 3G with Cydia ready to launch.

The Alyona Show talks to Geohot about his legal battle with Sony over the PS3 jailbreak. Let’s watch:

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith has tweeted that customers of Three in Ireland and the UK and China Unicom in China woke up today and found that that Cydia on their devices was blocked by the carrier. So, now the jailbroken devices don’t have access to certain content from Cydia when on the Three and China Unicom networks. Though, only main page is unavailable. Moreover, Cydia is blocked over 3G networks that means that the popular store still available via Wi-Fi.

Jay Freeman (better known as Saurik) has reported that he added a new feature to Cydia, the jailbreak application store. “Cydia Theme Center” provides easer search of for Retina and non-Retina themes. Right now, you will find a selection of free and paid themes popular in Cydia, as well as themes selected by the employees of MacCiti and ModMyi. Soon Cydia user also will be able to vote their favorites into Theme Center. Freeman has predicted that the feature would be really popular. After release of Theme Center he posted to Twitter: The second feature to use my Whole Package Index, the “Cydia Theme Center”, went up an hour ago, and 15,000 people have already tried it! ;P

Last week we reported that the well-known hacker Geohot might call his next jailbreak tool rubyra1n. Now guts from Dev Team hit that they know something about Geohot’s effort to bring a proper untethered jailbreak to iOS 4.2.1.

A recent tweet from MuscleNerd confirms the rumors: “I hear geohot does have an untether actually! Though not for all devices”.

May be soon we will jailbreak our devices with a new tool from George Hotz (better known as Geohot) called Rubyra1n. On March 27, 2010 George Hotz registered two domains limera1n.com and blackra1n.com, another jailbreak tool Hotz released last year. The new rubyra1n, however, doesn’t share the same data with limera1n.com — an app released in October to jailbreak iOS 4.1. Geohot doesn’t comment these rumors anyhow, but we, obviously, wouldn’t be surprised at all to see him coming out with his own iOS 4.2.1 jailbreak for all devices.

This week Google has released a new version of its client app for Android Market, which will work on any smartphone running Android OS 1.6 or higher.

The company aims to facilitate the process of discovering new software and its purchase. That’s why new Android Market will have a Cover Flow-like style of app listings and include new categories like Widgets and Live Wallpapers, as currently the catalog is filled pretty much with these kinds of software. Besides that, app pages will now have more info and links to related content.

Some changes were made to the policy of software returns. If earlier user could take his money back in case he didn’t like the app he bought within 24 hours, now this time is shortened to 15 minutes.

As the number of Android devices continues to grow and it becomes hard for developers to make their apps hardware compatible with as many existing handsets as possible, Google presents its new solution:

“To make it easier for developers to distribute and manage their products, we will introduce support for device targeting based on screen sizes and densities, as well as on GL texture compression formats.”

Another important feature of new Android Market is a new limitation of app file size, which is now extended to 50 MB (earlier it was 25 MB). This is still 40 times smaller than the current limitation for iOS apps (2GB). This can be explained by the fact that iOS apps can be downloaded not only via its mobile client (like apps for Android), but also via iTunes, that can be connected to the Internet in any possible way and thus capable to download such amounts of information. Nevertheless, some developers pass this limitation by offering tiny apps for Android that can download necessary files (like music, textures, video) of any size after its purchase.

However, Google’s attempts to create a rival to an App Store still are not successful as they can be. AppleInsider has studied the subject and revealed that the Android’s openness has led to a number of cases when popular titles like Radiant were cracked to be used as illegal copies by “97% of players in Asia, 70% in Europe and 43% in North America”. That’s why most of developers like Rovio (which created Angry Birds) offer free versions of their apps to earn money from showing the ads. But that kind of income is not as profitable as offering paid apps, which makes iOS more attractive for developers than Android.

It was also noted that Android Market offers poor security for users, though this situation can be changed by cleaning up the store. At least, that was what the developer of DoubleTwist Jon Lech Johansen advised Google more than a half a year ago, but the company has not still made any steps in that direction.

Apple has reportedly disabled its jailbreak detection API through iOS 4.2 software update. The API helped third-party mobile device management (MDM) applications to check for unauthorized modifications of system files. Apple’s jailbreak detection API provided MDM applications direct access to iOS system information and was able to ask the operating system directly if it had been jailbroken. Jailbreak exploits typically change a number of operating system files, and exploit one or another low-level OS features to let users directly load their own or third-party applications.

“We used it when it was available, but as an adjunct,” says Joe Owen, vice president of engineering at Sybase, which offers the Afaria device management software. “I’m not sure what motivated their removing that….”