Why you should jailbreak your child’s iPad or iPhone
Jailbreaking is the process of escaping Apple’s rigid ecosystem and may sound a little bit daunting to the average parent, but jailbreaking allows you to do so much more that can benefit your child than you might imagine.
Jailbreak sleep assist
The first great advantage to jailbreaking, and the only one that I’d personally need to go ahead and do it, is the ability to use the app f.lux.
A jailbroken iDevice allows you to change the color temperature of the screen at dusk/night, which will help your children get to sleep at night as opposed to wiring their brains into thinking it’s daylight from the bright blue light that emits from the device.
The theory is that blueish light halts the brain’s natural production of melatonin for up to two hours. I’ve been using this app on my PC, iPad, and a similarly themed Android app called Twilight for the past month and have finally gotten to the point where I’m always sleepy at night.
Save yourself some bedtime drama simply by making it so your child is sleepy. It’s sad that you need to jailbreak for this, but that’s the Apple ecosystem for you.
Disable the camera
Don’t want your kids taking pictures of your butt while you sleep or getting into video chats with strangers? Disable the camera for all apps.
Password protect applications
Don’t want your kid in your banking app? With a jailbroken device you can choose to password protect any application you want. Or hide them.
Gesture control
Want to allow your kid to launch their favorite Barbie app by swiping their hand up? That’s possible. Launch Silly Songs with Chica while on your home network by pressing Volume Down? Yup. Launch Netflix by shaking the device while at the lock screen? Do it.
Much much more
I’ll be writing about some of the more kid-oriented useful jailbreak apps later on, but the Cydia jailbreak app is full of things that can be used for children, or to protect your device from changes or access by children.
The downside
If your connection port ever fails and you need to take the device in for warranty work you might be denied. This usually isn’t an issue as you can un-jailbreak the device, or hide evidence that it’s in a jailbroken state by hiding the Cydia app, but you never know.
It’s easy
Head over to the evasi0n website (that’s a 0 there, not an o,) and follow their instructions to the letter. As of this writing it works on pretty much anything up to 7.0.6.
