iPhone OS 4 won’t be publicly available until this summer and has been in the hands of developers for only a few days, but that hasn’t stopped iPhone Dev Team from jailbreaking the beta version of the operating system.
Jailbreaking is the process of hacking an iPhone or iPod touch so that third-party apps Apple hasn’t approved for distribution through the App Store can be installed.
Like iPhone OS 4, the redsn0w 0.9.5 jailbreak is also a beta and comes with its own list of potential issues. The redsn0w beta, for example, currently only supports the iPhone 3G and requires Mac OS X.
“This is a beta release of redsn0w targeted at developers of jailbroken apps,” the iPhone Dev Team Web site said. “Please not that this beta is not meant for the average end-user. There are many things ‘broken’ with jailbroken apps in the 4.0beta1 environment right now.”
The group released the redsn0w beta so developers of apps that require jailbreaking could start working on iPhone OS 4 compatibility updates ahead of the planned summer release. The group is advising regular end users to stay away from the hack for now, which sounds like pretty good advice.