frailexample56: Hacker gets native code to run on Windows Phone 7 -- will a jailbreak follow?

Friday, November 26, 2010

Hacker gets native code to run on Windows Phone 7 -- will a jailbreak follow?

It seems, thanks to one of Samsung's recent additions to the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, that a jailbreak of Microsoft's latest mobile platform might come a lot sooner than anticipated.

In a high-tech plot twist that even mother could've predicted, it turns out that Windows Phone 7 can run native code! Until today, it was thought that WP7 apps could only be written in Silverlight, an abstracted platform that made jailbreaking all but impossible. If third-party apps can contain native code, it makes jailbreaking all but a foregone conclusion. There still remains the problem of getting such apps onto your phone, though: Microsoft isn't going to approve the addition of a jailbreaking app on the Marketplace!

Microsoft's acceptance of Samsung's native app raises one other important question: why can Samsung submit a native app, but small-time indie developers can't? Samsung's app obviously required some functionality that only native, low-level code could provide -- but why shouldn't all developers get the ability to hook into the underlying operating system?

As Long Zheng says, for a phone's indie and homebrew community to really thrive, unfettered access to the phone's hardware is required. Let's hope this is just the beginning of WP7 hacking!

Filed under: Windows Mobile, Microsoft