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One of the primary markets for cracked phones is for spying on partners.

In the abstract I’m a strong supporter of the idea that you should be able to use and modify a device you own as you see fit…but in the real world “ownership” is a whole lot murkier than the mental model a lot of tech people have.

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I don't want folding iPhone, I want an iPhone I that turns to desktop once I plug it into USB-C monitor. It has faster CPU and more RAM than Neo.
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The only thing I really miss from my jailbreak days is an app that could talk to the cellular baseband and display all cell towers nearby on a map and showed which you were using.

I used to have my home screens fully customized but that’s a lot of work creating icons for hundreds of apps. Or even dozens.

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1. install apps without the app store so we dont ahve to pay 100 bucks yearly for it to apple

2. run linux

3. run emulators

4. run VMs

5. install steam

6. make it a media server

etc

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run a real browser!
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This is one of the strongest arguments for why ordinary users need the ability to do this. Not only because they would actually benefit from it (e.g. better ad blockers), but because things like that have a network effect that you can't get from the four people who root own their iPhone with a PDF being the only ones able to install a third party browser engine.
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Apple added emulator support a couple of years ago. Delta works great.

I’ve seen and used terminal applications from the App Store that seem to run a Linux VM locally, which would check off items 2 and 4.

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Retro game emulators were allowed only 2y ago and bold retro. JIT is still not allowed so they are restricted in being run in interpreted mode. Also, neither is allowed executing arbitrary arm64 binaries. And, of course, no hypervisor access. The Linux-using term (iSH) works by utilizing a x86 emulator / compatibility layer (basically translates x86 binaries and maps Linux calls to native ones). In the sole VM host available, UTM SE, the "SE" means "slow edition". Now jailbreak and you've full, JIT-capable, UTM (QEMU) and NewTerm (kinda Termux for iOS). Hypervisor access still not possible though.
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