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iphonejailbreak

BYOD: Disadvantages of using a jailbroken iPhone for development

Background

I currently work as an iOS developer at a small startup. I have an iPhone 6s of my own that they encourage me to test on. I also have access to a company iPhone 5s and 4s. The iPhone 6s is my own and they in no way force me to use it.

Question

I am considering jailbreaking my personal phone. I wonder if there would be an impact at my job and if this would be positive or negative.

So: what are the disadvantages of using a jailbroken iPhone for development, if any? Bonus question: would there be any reason for my employer to have an issue with this?

Note: I did find multiple questions like this one and this one, which do not answer my question, as they are either about making jailbroken apps, have outdated, contradicting and/or anecdotal answers or ask only about a certain aspect of development on a jailbroken device.

Solution

  • Ask your employer if he has any problems with that. Other than that jailbroken phone for a regular development is just like any non-jailbroken phone. Everything will work as it should. Nothing will break. At least with recent jailbreaks.

    I remember only a single case when jailbreak actually breaks the app. Apparently, OpenVPN application crashes on jailbroken phones when you have existing non-OpenVPN VPN profiles in device settings. When you delete them OpenVPN will stop crashing. Apart from that I don't remember any AppStore app that doesn't work on jailbroken phones (apart from jailbreak detection obviously but it looks like now Apple forbids such checks as they violate the guidelines)

    Jailbreak can also give you access to something that you shouldn't have access to. For example, I remember on iOS 7 on jailbroken phone I could read phone calls history SQLite database but on non-jailbroken I had no access to it. It might give you a false sense that's something is working when in fact it's not. But again, that will be the case only when you're accessing something you shouldn't in the first place. Like, you shouldn't try to access phone calls history whethere you have access to it or not.