If you know a bit about technology, you might have have heard the term Jailbreaking. When some people hear that term, they immediately think its a virus of something illegal. Just hearing the word “jail” can give you a clue. But it’s not. In fact, according to Forbes, in 2013, over 7 million people jailbreak their iPhones. That’s a lot of people. So why do people jailbreak their phones? Why does Apple want jailbreaking to be banned?

Well, here’s a bit of information about Jailbreaking: Jailbreaking is basically downloading a tweak either from your phone or computer that lets you customize your phone entirely.  How they get into the software is by finding a hole in the software that Apple did not patch, exploiting it, and then trying to find out ways to add things. From there, when you download the software, you can remove all the restrictions Apple put on your phone.

Now for some people, their iPhone is perfectly fine. But others, like myself, don’t like everything Apple does. When you have an Android phone, everything is much more open, letting you download anything, whether it’s good, or bad.  But Apple doesn’t let you do that. Instead, every app you download has a security check to make sure that everything is safe to use. But with jailbreaking, all those limitations are gone. You can fully customize anything you want.

Some examples of good jailbreak tweaks are SBFlip. This tweak lets you flip your phone sideways like an iPhone 6+ or 7+, but without needing the size or the phone. Instead, it tinkers with the software, and makes a new version of it. Do you want 3D touch on an older phone? Just download  a few tweaks and BOOM. Now you have 3D touch on an iPhone 5.

There are a lot of other things, like YouTube Red for free, or Spotify premium for free. There are a lot of games and app enhancements you can get from jailbreaking. Even Apple sees jailbreaking and copies it. Do you know how you can say Hey Siri without a plug? Jailbreaking your iPhone had that years ago. In fact, many of the newer tweaks in the ios are copied straight from jailbreaking. That’s how big this is.

So why did I write this? Well, I wrote this to bring awareness to everyone. Lately, it’s been harder to jailbreak because Apple’s security is much better. More and more jailbreakers are quitting, and not many people are left. Even on of the main contributors of jailbreaking said it’s not stable to do it anymore. In my opinion, I think that jailbreaking is perfectly fine. Jailbreaking is legal and is safe as long as you know what you’re doing.

First of all, I think that it’s your phone, so you should do whatever you want. It is your property, and you paid the phone entirely. No one should have complete control on what you own. If it’s a phone that you are borrowing, than you should probably not jailbreak, but anything that is yours, you should be able to do whatever you want.

Secondly, most of the claims that Apple makes about jailbreaking are very lackluster. According to their website, the main reasons not to jailbreak is because of security, battery life, and instability. First of all, like I said earlier, if you know what you’re doing, that this should be fine. Downloading anything out of Apples security wall is risky. But, this is the same case for Android. Android has a much more open app store, which lets publishers put whatever they want. Battery life is a big issue, but there are many things you can do to solve that. You can download tweaks, or just add things like low power mode to save more battery. The last thing is instability. Nothing will happen if you jailbreak, unless you download a glitchy tweak.

Most of these claims are very lacking, and in my opinion, the benefits far outweigh the risks. If you don’t klnow what you are doing, than this could screw up your phone. But please Apple, don’t block the rest of the people that actually want to use their iPhone for jailbreaking.