The ties that bind the Apple (AAPL) iPhone to AT&T (T) are being broken in droves today following the release of iUnlock, the first open-source procedure that frees the device to work on other wireless networks.
"If you're like us, you're furiously unlocking every iPhone in sight," writes Paul Miller at Engadget. The code, which was developed by an anonymous group that calls itself the iPhone Dev Team, is available in zip files at Gizmodo here.
For iPhone owners in the U.S., this means that their phones will work with SIM cards from T-Mobile, which uses the same GSM protocol. It has even greater significance overseas, where GSM is standard. With iUnlock, the iPhone can be used in much of Europe and the Far East.
The release of the procedure comes 74 days after the iPhone went on sale and one day after the first commercial unlock solution became available. It was only Monday that iPhoneSimFree finally started shipping their $99 product to iPhone resellers.
As it happens, it was the release of iPhoneSimFree that gave the open-source team the clues they needed to come up with what they claim is a similar but independently developed procedure. You can read here Paul Miller's account of how programmers with names like Zappaz, Hexxat and GeoHot, working through the night and communicating on IRC channels, raced to crack the code.
The iUnlock procedure is not for the faint of heart. Documentation is scant and there a real risk that a misstep will "brick" your iPhone. Moreover, it's known that several nice iPhone features, including visual voicemail and Apple's version of YouTube, don't work on unlocked phones.
Apple today had no comment on the news. Earlier this week, hardware marketing chief Greg Joswiak told editors from PC Magazine that the company was taking a "neutral stance" toward third-party iPhone applications, although he might feel differently about this hack.
AT&T's legal department is more likely to take a hard line, since this threatens their main source of iPhone revenue. But the legal situation here is murky. The exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that allows individuals to unlock their own phones may not protect companies that sell the same service to others. But iUnlock is free. And if AT&T's lawyers did try to take someone to court, they might have a hard time getting their hands on Zappaz, Hexxat and GeoHot.