Jailbreaking Your iPhone

It sounds sinister, but jailbreaking your iPhone is perfectly legal; however it can be dangerous for your phone.

A team of hackers have successfully come up with a program to help you override the iPhone's operating system and allow you to download apps not approved by Apple.

"The iPhone has been waiting for the jailbreak for quite some time now. It basically cuts the tie from Apple and what Apple says you can and cannot do entirely," Mobile Phone Technician Scott Brodie said.

How to jailbreak your phone and why to do it is plastered all over the Internet. 

"As a matter of fact, you can watch the YouTube video and pretty much follow it step-by-step either to do a jailbreak or a root; the part that typically brings errors is what that person may download," Brodie said.

Brodie used to help people jailbreak their phones until problems followed.

"They can cause random issues such as phone freezing, shutting down, anything along those lines; basically the device not working properly," Brodie said.

But he can understand why iPhone owners want to do it. The reasons range from changing the phone's appearance to using it as a WiFi hotspot.

"The carrier will make you pay an extra charge to do a WiFi hotspot off your device and by jailbreaking you can cut that tie. It basically would just run off your Internet that comes to your phone anyway," Brodie said.

According to Brodie, while the program came out to jailbreak your phone earlier this week; by the end of the week Apple already came up with new software with a patch to not allow it. And that will have the hackers working even harder to circumvent it. 

But don't confuse jailbreaking with unlocking a phone to use more than one cell phone carrier. That is now illegal. 

Jailbreaking the iPhone isn't permanent. If you don't like it, you can simply restore the phone's factory settings. That's not the case for the Android jailbreak, known as a root. Brodie says it is more complicated to reverse the Android back to factory settings.