The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone

by Brian Merchant

the episode gave rise to a number of pressing questions increasingly being asked of a society conducted on smartphones:

How secure should our devices be? Should they be impenetrable to anyone but the user? Are there circumstances when the government should be able to gain access to a citizen’s private data—like, when that citizen is a known mass murderer?

authorities are pursuing less sensational...

This is a glitchy paradox of the moment.

We share more information than ever across social networks and messaging platforms, and our phones collect more data about us than any mainstream device before—location data, fingerprints, payment info, and private pictures and files.

But we have the same, or stronger, expectations of privacy as people di...

So, to keep safe the things that hackers might want most—bank-account info, passwords—Apple d...

“We want the user’s secrets to not be exposed to App...

The Secure Enclave is “protected by a strong cryptographic master key from the user’s passcode… off...

Basically, the enclave is a brand-new subcomputer built specifically to handle encryption and privacy without ever involving Apple’s servers.

It’s designed to interface with your iPhone in such a way that your most crucial data stays private and entirely inaccessible to Apple, the government, or anyone else.

As with most other modern electronics, hacking has helped shape the culture and contours of the products themselves.

hacking has been around for as long as people have been transmitting information electronically.

The culture of hacking, reshaping, and bending consumer technologies to one’s personal will is as old as the history of those technologies.

The iPhone is not immune. In fact, hackers helped push the phone toward adopting its most successful feature, the App Store.

“Every product starts out in an unknown state,”

Apple, he says, “lacked a lot of exploit mitigations, they had lots of bugs in really critical services.”

But that was to be expected. It was a new frontier, and there were going to be pitfalls.

It took hackers only a day or two to break into the iPhone’s software.

Remember the iPod lesson: Restricting users to Mac limits the audience.

Jailbreaking became the popular term for knocking down the iPhone’s security system and allowing users to treat the device as an actual personal computer—letting them modify settings, install new apps, and so forth. But breaking in was only the first step.

Hacking is a competitive sport.

Collectives function a bit like pro teams; you can’t just show up with a ball and expect to play.

Hackers have to prove t...

“Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software,

which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed.”

Apple’s threat went unheeded.

Apple patched the bug that enabled the TIFF exploit, setting off what would be a years-long battle. The iPhone Dev Team and other jailbreaking crews would find a new vulnerability and release new jailbreaks. The first to find a new one would get cred. Then Apple would fix the bug and brick the jailbroken phones.

Over time, the jailbreaking community grew in size and stature.

The Dev Team reverse-engineered the phone’s operating system to allow it to run third-party apps.

It was the hackers who were pushing the device to become more like the creativity augmenter, the knowledge manipulator that Steve Jobs’s idol Alan Kay originally imagined mobile computing could be.

The popularity of jailbreaking and Cydia provided a public demonstration of a palpable demand for, at the very least, a way to get new apps, and, at the most, a way to have more control over the device.

it turns out that this kind of hacking was entirely legal,”

While jailbreaking is not as sensational a practice as it once was—like any worthy tech endeavor, it’s been declared dead by the pundits multiple times—the

the legacy of the jailbreakers remains.

Perhaps more than anything, though, the jailbreakers demonstrated living, coded proof that there was immense demand for an App Store and that people would be able to do great things with it. Through their illicit innovation, they showed that the iPhone could become a vibrant, diverse ecosystem for doing more than making calls, surfing the web, and increasing productivity. And they showed that developers would be willing to go to great lengths to participate on the platform; and they didn’t just talk, they built a working model.

Thus, the hacker iPhone Dev Team should get a share of at least some of the credit in Jobs’s decision to let the real iPhone Dev Team open the device to developers in 2008.

Another legacy of the jailbreaking movement was that it drove Apple to focus on security with renewed vigor.

“Consumers shouldn’t have to think about security,”

They stopped playing cat-and-mouse with hackers and started rewriting the rules, setting out mousetraps long before the mice had a chance to sneak into the house.

Nobody outside Apple knows for sure how the device works, just that it seems to. Really well.

And it’s a good thing that Apple started upping its security game.

The iPhone has been helped on this front, somewhat ironically, by the rise of Android phones.

The iPhone may be the single most popular and profitable device on the planet, but it’s the only phone running the iOS operating system. Samsung, LG, Huawei, and other handset manufacturers all run Android.

That gives Android around 80 percent of the mobile OS market share worldwide. And malicious hackers tend to try to maximize their time and...

iPhone users update their phones in much larger proportions than Android users do.

Apple’s more stringent app-approval process helps too.

The iOS devices are the single most secure consumer devices available,

“It is light-years ahead of every other trusted device that exists on the market.

More and more people are using non-general-purpose computing devices, they’re using Kindles, iPads, ChromeBooks, iPhones, Apple TV, whatever, all these locked-down devices that serve one single purpose,”