Apple Watch Jailbreak: What We Could See

The Apple Watch will be released at some point in April, according to Apple CEO Tim Cook himself, starting a new era for the Cupertino-based company, but what could the Apple Watch have in store for the future of jailbreaking?

There has been almost no chatter about an Apple Watch jailbreak, but that hasn’t stopped potential Apple Watch users from wondering what a jailbroken Apple Watch would be like.

There are a lot of details that we still have yet to find out about the Apple Watch, such as battery life, connectivity options, and how the overall user interface works on the device. We have a decent idea of what to expect, but there are a lot of things left unopened at this point, including an Apple Watch jailbreak.

Of course, in order for jailbreak developers to even think about jailbreaking the Apple Watch, they need to get their hands on the device itself and sift through the code, which means we probably won’t have a good idea on when an Apple Watch jailbreak could arrive until the device is actually launched.

How Would an Apple Watch Jailbreak Work?

Even when thinking about an Apple Watch jailbreak, it’s hard to see how it would work exactly, and it raises a lot of questions, like will your iPhone need to be jailbroken as well? Would you jailbreak your Apple Watch via your iPhone? These are trivial questions of course, but they make us wonder.

If I had to take a guess, I wouldn’t be surprised if a tool came out for jailbroken iPhones that was specifically meant for jailbreaking the Apple Watch. This means that, yes, your iPhone would need to be jailbroken as well, and you would download the Apple Watch jailbreak tool directly from a developers website or through Cydia.

From there, opening the tool would begin the jailbreaking process, and you would of course have your Apple Watch connected to your iPhone so that the two devices can talk to each other during the jailbreaking process.

After the process finished, your Apple Watch would be jailbroken and you could begin tinkering around, but this leads us to another interesting question.

What Could an Apple Watch Jailbreak Do?

Compared to an iPhone or an iPad, the Apple Watch has rather limited functionality, especially since it will rely on your iPhone most of the time for many tasks, but there are still some things we think jailbreakers will benefit from by jailbreaking their Apple Watches.

While native apps will eventually come to the Apple Watch this year at some point, the device will mainly rely on the iPhone for apps, but this is where jailbreaking could change that. jailbreak developers could make third-party native apps for the Apple Watch in favor of companion apps that need to be run on iPhone. Of course, they probably wouldn’t have the feature set of the equivalent app from the actual developer, but it would be better than nothing. Plus, jailbreaking could provide the opportunity to install apps that Apple wouldn’t normally allow, just like on iPhone.

A jailbroken Apple Watch could also allow for advanced settings to be changed that Apple wouldn’t normally allow, like changing how the Crown would work and maybe even altering what the different taps and presses do on the touch screen.

Read: Apple Watch: What We Know So Far

We’d also be excited to see the ability to install third-party watch faces and not just have the option between Apple’s own watch faces, which could get boring fairly quickly.

One feature of the new device is that pressing down on the Digital Crown of the Apple Watch will activate Siri, and you’ll get the usual Siri functionality, like searching for nearby movie theatres, restaurants, etc. However, we’re guessing that the functionality will be limited just like it is on iPhone, which means an Apple Watch jailbreak could bring its own enhancements to Siri on the smartwatch. There aren’t a lot of iOS Siri tweaks for jailbroken iPhones, but there are some that allow you to expand the functionality of Siri to third-party apps, which is huge and it could be bigger for the Apple Watch.

However, one of the most important questions that we should be asking is if Apple Watch will even be popular enough for developers to bother with an Apple Watch jailbreak.

There’s no doubt that the Apple Watch will be popular to some extent, and users will buy it, but watches are a product that are quite niche and not everyone wears one. And even if everyone did wear a watch, paying $350 for one isn’t something that a lot of people will do. Thus, the Apple Watch may not be as popular as the iPhone or iPad.

Take the Apple TV for example. We have yet to see a jailbreak for the third-gen Apple TV, and that’s mostly because it’s a product that’s not as popular as the iPhone or iPad. Thus, developers aren’t taking the time to jailbreak the set-top box. The same could possibly be said for the Apple Watch, but we’ll ultimately have to wait and see.