Over the weekend, we showed off Siri running on a jailbroken iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G thanks to the tireless efforts of iPhone hackers chpwn and Steve Troughton.
Clearly, Siri works just fine on lesser devices like the iPhone 4 and iPod touch, but despite this, chpwn and Troughton warned that we wouldn’t see an authorized release anytime soon. Now chpwn is clarifying why, and it’s just as the Dev Team warned us: Siri on non-iPhone 4S devices require piracy.
Here’s the problem in a nutshell. Even though Apple’s iPhone 4S firmware is on the internet for all to download, the only people who are legally authorized to run any files in that firmware are people who own an iPhone 4S.
So just to copy Siri’s files off an iPhone 4S firmware file, you’re committing piracy unless you own a 4S. Okay, that’s a bummer, but what if you want to copy your Siri files from your iPhone 4S to your iPad 2? That’s legal, right?
Yup, totally legal. But here’s the rub: Siri’s baked so deeply into the iPhone 4S that it takes a jailbreak to suck all of its digital marrow out. And since there’s no iPhone 4S jailbreak yet, that’s not so easy to do.
You’d think if history was any guidance, we’ll see an iPhone 4S jailbreak soon… but it’s worth noting that Apple’s A5 processor makes jailbreaks a lot harder, as best evidenced by the fact that the iPad 2 still isn’t jailbroken outside of userland exploits like JailbreakMe, and even then only under iOS 4.3.3. So we could be waiting to get Siri on our older devices for quite a while yet.
