iPhone & iPod Touch Jailbreak: Now Incredibly Simple

Steve Jobs’ announcement that he intends to release an SDK for the iPhone and iPod touch, seems to have shut up many critics. While the official software is not set to arrive until February, that doesn’t mean that you can’t have your apps in the meantime.

A new method of “jailbreaking” (enabling 3rd party software and other goodies) the iPhone and iPod touch was released by the iPhone dev team in the last couple of days. The procedure makes jailbreaking your iPhone or iPod touch as easy as just simply navigating to a website in the mobile version of the Safari web browser. Now that is easy!

Surf to jailbreakme.com on your Apple mobile device, read through the disclaimers, and select “Install AppSnapp”.

Let the application do it’s magical work and don’t touch it. Depending upon your internet connection, it could take around 5 minutes. Also, don’t worry if your Safari crashes - that happened to me too. Once it’s done, it will go back to the “Slide to Unlock” screen, and once you’re back in, you’ll see an Installer.app icon right on your main screen.

In addition to installing Installer, AppSnapp will patch the Springboard (Apple’s nomenclature for the home screen) to allow for future apps to automatically show up on the iPhone/iTouch’s main screen. In addition, if it’s an unlocked phone, it will automatically fix YouTube, and will activate inactive iPhones automatically, leaving already active iPhones alone.

The most ironic part of the whole procedure is the fact that it actually makes your iPhone or iPod touch more secure than it would have been had you not jailbroken it, due to the fact that it automatically patches the same security hole in Mobile Safari that was used to jailbreak it in the first place. Now there’s truly no reason not to jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch because it’s simply that easy. Stay tuned for a coming series that will help you customize your iPhone/iPod touch to the max, and for some of the applications that I like best.

UPDATE: According to some of the commenters, it looks like this works better over Wi-Fi than it does over en EDGE network. Also, Safari is supposed to crash, because that means that it’s exploited the security hole.

Disclaimer: Neither MacApper, nor Jacob Schulman, is responsible for any accidental damage that may ensue should something go wrong in this procedure. However, I can tell you that I have performed this operation multiple times with no failure, and that a simple restore in iTunes will bring your device back to factory settings. Also, should you need to bring in your device to the Apple Store or Genius Bar, it’d be wise to restore it before because loading 3rd party software on the iPhone or iPod touch does void your warranty.