PlanetBeing’s Advice on Becoming an iOS Jailbreak Developer

Ten years ago, tech savvy people were called geeks. Now, people that know the ins-and-outs of a computer system and can make their way around complicate code language are superstars. PlanetBeing and the rest of the evad3rs’ team have delivered more than a jailbreak for iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S.

PlanetBeing aka David Wang is one of the four members of the new Dev-Team that delivered a jailbreak for iOS 6 on iPhone 5. He is also one of the most popular names in the internet community and thanks to the highly anticipated jailbreak David Wang is now a name a lot of kids in highschool know and are curious about. In a recent AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on Reddit, users were keen to know more about jailbreaking as a career opportunity as well as the kind of training it requires. Several asked bluntly what it takes to become an iOS jailbreaker and if that’s something that adds value to a CV.

PlanetBeing’s advice for people who would like to get into jailbreaking professionally or just of curiosity to start by reading everything there is about existing jailbreaks. “Perhaps try to rewrite an existing exploit another way, or improving it somehow” the hacker advises and even if “there’s going to be a lot of stuff you won’t understand at first” just be patient while you take the time to put all pieces together.

Just “make small achievable goals and work/study hard to accomplish those”. Also don’t expect others to motivate you or teach you. Being self-motivated is key: “if you have to rely on other people to teach you, you won’t get very far jailbreaking unfortunately”.

Since most often a jailbreak process involves the use of several tools it is definitely a good idea to start get familiar with fxr.watson.org, IDA, vim, clang, opensource.apple.com or “an existing jailbreak with OpenSSH”.

Since jailbreaking involves a lot of coding it would be easier to have a background in a related field. For instance, when PlanetBeing first started developing a jailbreak he “had a lot of programming background and a passion for building my own programming projects in my spare time”.