It’s been quite a while since I jailbroke my first iPhone, an iPhone 3GS, back in 2010.
Fortunately, from that iOS 4 to the current iOS 13, the iPhone Operating System has incorporated many improvements and features that were previously only possible through applications or tweaks on a jailbroken iPhone. These continuous changes made me abandon the need to jailbreak my personal iPhone.
However, Apple continues to excessively block access to our iPhones and one change that particularly annoyed me was when Apple removed in September 2017, with the launch of iTunes 12.7 and iOS 11, the management of Apps within iTunes that allowed us to back up our Apps, as well as installing them on our iPhone from our Mac using iTunes.
This change prevents us from downloading the applications that we have acquired for our iPhone from our Mac using iTunes so we can save locally in our computer the IPA of the applications so that, if necessary, we can re-install them in our iPhone Apps previously acquired without having to download them again from the App Store.
Saving the IPA of the Apps we’ve purchased is especially useful if the developer or Apple itself decides to remove it from the App Store at some point. Isn’t that right, TomTom? Isn’t that right?
As it turns out, I purchased the TomTom GPS navigation application for Europe. When I bought it, TomTom promised that the map updates would be free for life. But some time ago TomTom announced that it was no longer updating the application and maps. But not only that, they removed it completely from the App Store. So, despite having paid for it, I can’t install it on any of my devices because it has disappeared from the App Store and Apple removed the possibility of backing it up with iTunes time ago.
So I find myself in a situation where neither Apple nor TomTom provide me with any way to install an application that I paid for. My only alternative is to jailbreak an iPhone 6 where I still have the App installed to access the whole file system so I can extract it and manually “build” the IPA to install it on another device. Thank you, Apple. Thank you, TomTom.
This iPhone 6 has iOS 12.4.3 installed, so I dived into finding current options to allow jailbreak on this combination of device and iOS version.
