This week, when Tim Cook took the stage at a "Spring Forward" event in San Francisco, he finally filled in some of the last unknown details on the Apple Watch. He also announced many other events, but one thing he wanted people to know was that the operating system for Apple devices, iOS, was getting an update to version 8.2.
When we reported on iOS 8.2 a few weeks ago, we stated that iOS 8.2 would be out to support the Apple Watch. According to Gotta Be Mobile, there are no visual changes but there is a better health app, more stability, bug fixes, as well as security updates. Forbes still calls iOS 8.2 "The Big One", but the biggest feature is that it contains an app to sync the Apple Watch to the iPhone. Were you to download it now on your iPhone, you might notice a little surprise.
According to The Independent, Apple's latest iOS update puts an Apple Watch ad that cannot be deleted on the iPhone's home screen. As stated before, iOS 8.2 puts the Apple Watch app on the iPhone automatically, but since the watch isn't going to be officially out until April 24th, it seems a bit premature to have it. However, if you click on that Apple Watch application, you can watch some videos of Apple's new smartwatch. Eventually, if the user should purchase an Apple Watch, this application will help pair it with the iPhone. Cnet also reports that it can effectively squash the FREAK security bug which has made Apple's mobile Safari and Google's Android browsers more vulnerable to hacking.
Even though there might not be any grandiose changes to iOS with version 8.2, there are some long-awaited bug fixes. For examples, there is that "GMT Bug" in iOS 8 that causes Calendar events to appear in GMT. This caused a lot of messed up schedules from Apple users and has been one of the biggest threads on Apple Support Communities. There is also an issue with Bluetooth where no audio is heard until the call is answered, but iOS 8.2 should get rid of that.
So how will it work with jailbreaking? For those of you unfamiliar with the process of jailbreaking, it is a way of removing the restrictions of iOS (the closed source operating system on Apple devices) on their mobiles such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. One of the more recent versions of iOS is 8.1.2, and the jailbreakers were able to get into this one, allowing Apple users all the jailbreaking perks like downloading of additional applications, extensions, and themes that are not available through the Apple Store. The more recent version of iOS, version 8.1.3, has some issues, and one of them is that it is not vulnerable to jailbreaking. So, will this carry over into iOS 8.2? Of course it does, so you should consider an iOS device like an iPod, iPhone, or iPad completely non-jailbreak-able by extension.
Fortunately, Gotta Be Mobile has some good news regarding the jailbreak on iOS 8.2, and that progress on an iOS 8.2 jailbreak is looking optimistic. The TaiG jailbreak was able to do iOS 8.1, and they apparently have jailbreaking available for iOS 8.2 beta 1 and 2. Of course, betas are meant to be replaced, which means that this jailbreaking doesn't work anymore. Still, it is a definite sign of progress.
If you have an iPhone, iPad, or newer version of the iPod Touch, and you want iOS 8.2, then you should go to your Settings, then to General, and select Software Update. If you want to jailbreak your iDevice, then you might want to deliberately hold off on any update until some developer perfects jailbreaking for iOS 8.2.
