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Hacker gets native code to run on Windows Phone 7 -- will a jailbreak follow?
It seems, thanks to one of Samsung's recent additions to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, that a jailbreak of Microsoft's latest mobile platform might come a lot sooner than anticipated.In a high-tech plot twist that even mother could've predicted, it turns out that Windows Phone 7 can run native code! Until today, it was thought that WP7 apps could only be written in Silverlight, an abstracted platform that made jailbreaking all but impossible. If third-party apps can contain native code, it makes jailbreaking all but a foregone conclusion. There still remains the problem of getting such apps onto your phone, though: Microsoft isn't going to approve the addition of a jailbreaking app on the Marketplace!
Microsoft's acceptance of Samsung's native app raises one other important question: why can Samsung submit a native app, but small-time indie developers can't? Samsung's app obviously required some functionality that only native, low-level code could provide -- but why shouldn't all developers get the ability to hook into the underlying operating system?
As Long Zheng says, for a phone's indie and homebrew community to really thrive, unfettered access to the phone's hardware is required. Let's hope this is just the beginning of WP7 hacking!
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Subscribe to commentsAurrinNov 12th 2010 1:48PM
They'll likely leave the app store discrepancy in place as something of a understanding requirement. A jailbreaker native code hosting app would open the door not only for fun hacky things but for nasty data-theft hacky things as well. So, by leaving it out of the app store, they introduce a barrier that, in order to overcome, you (mostly) have to have a sufficient understanding of the phone that you won't be very likely to put something on it that would result in data security issues for you. I've seen that kind of implicit-barrier-as-a-test thing in a number of situations before, and it's probably good at screening out the people who really should just stick to the very safe stuff.