It seems like Apple actively tries to ruin the functionality of libimobiledevice with each release of iOS. It worked the best on my iPhone 6 and iOS 9.3.4.
It seems even stranger to me to consider it an active effort.
More likely to me that engineering teams at Apple simply don't give much of a shit about maintaining compatibility with a tool that's not affiliated with them, and will redesign things or make breaking changes as it suits their project goals - and unaffiliated tools like this are simply stuck in a perpetual game of catchup.
> and unaffiliated tools like this are simply stuck in a perpetual game of catchup.
So it's still a problem. Apple knows about these unaffiliated tools, and they do very little to maintain communique with them until it's convenient for Apple to do so. This is nothing new, and it's one of the reasons you couldn't pay me to develop on iOS these days.
But why should they maintain communications with them? Don't get me wrong, it would certainly be nice of them to, but I don't see how someone else doing unaffiliated, unrequested, unguaranteed work based on my own work creates any sort of obligation for either of us.
I figure that it would be a good way for the world's most valuable company to give back to their core userbase, and it would certainly be a step in the right direction for helping developers like me who are highly skeptical of Apple's commitment to building a robust developer ecosystem. They need all the help they can get, because it's starting to look less and less viable for me to switch to a Mac as time goes on. It will be interesting to watch how they reconcile pressure from developers over the next few years.
I think iphone owners on here understand what apple intends for their devices, but simply like the alternatives less. So they try and hack around the restrictions placed on their iphones.
General purpose computers, as we understand them, are a niche market and potentially quite harmful in untrained hands. Apple is targeting the mainstream consumer. They still sell GPCs though, under the Mac brand.
Apple is welcome to build the "mainstream computer", but they should do so with respect to the protocols and open-source space around them. If they continue their oppressive approach to hardware and software development, they'll have a hard time defending themselves when people accuse them of a monopoly.