basically, jailbreaking is a type of “privilege escalation.” Now that’s a pretty technical term so let me break it down. User privilege refers to how much access a user has to any given system, in this case iOS. And when you jailbreak your iPhone, you gain additional access to parts of the operating system that were previously restricted – so you’re achieving an escalated level of privilege on your device, so privilege escalation. And this is usually achieved by exploiting some kind of design flaw or bug in the operating system. So to sum it up, jailbreaking is a way for users to do a lot more with their iPhone than what was previously possible.

The term “jailbreaking” originated with iOS, which began pretty much as soon as iPhones were released, but it’s been used to describe privilege escalation in other systems as well, like Playstation. Similar tools have been developed for other systems in recent years. For example, “rooting” became a popular process among Android phone and tablet users to escalate privileges on those devices. Thanks to a huge community of hackers, developers, and coders that love to tinker with technology, there’s been a way to jailbreak pretty much every iteration of iOS within a short time of their release.