Apple Hires The Guy Who Hacked Together A Better iOS Notifications System
Back in February, I wrote that MobileNotifier (a replacement notifications system for jailbroken iOS devices) would be the one thing that would make anyone want to jailbreak — and I stand by it.
Context & Ripple Effects
The notification story has been building all spring: Cult of Mac reported in February that Apple was revamping the iOS notification system, and by March TechCrunch was openly lobbying Cupertino to copy MobileNotifier, the jailbroken-device replacement that had become the strongest argument for jailbreaking at all. Instead of copying it, Apple has now hired its developer.
The move fits an older pattern — Engadget noted back in 2009 that Apple used a jailbroken iPhone in a patent application — and it lands while Apple is barely growing U.S. smartphone share per comScore, making polish gaps like notifications a competitive liability worth closing from inside.
First-order effects
- Apple gains direct control of the design that critics judged better than its own notification system, ahead of the revamp it had already reportedly begun.
- MobileNotifier itself now sits on the wrong side of the line: its creator is employed by Apple, and the jailbreak community's flagship use case is headed toward absorption into stock iOS.
Second-order effects
- Third-party notification layers like Boxcar, which pushed iPhone alerts forward with its 4.0 release last November, face Apple shipping comparable functionality natively — the classic platform-vendor squeeze on adjacent utility apps.
- Other jailbreak developers gain leverage: Apple demonstrably recruits from their ranks rather than litigating or ignoring them, raising the odds more tweaks get hired away than cloned.
Third-order effects
- If hiring-over-copying becomes the default, the jailbreak scene hardens into an unofficial R&D pipeline for iOS — Apple sourcing interface fixes from the very modding community it otherwise locks down.
- For users, the calculus of jailbreaking shifts structurally: each absorbed innovation removes a reason to void the warranty, narrowing jailbreaking to tinkerers rather than feature-seekers.
The trend: iOS is evolving partly by acquiring the jailbreak community's best work through hiring rather than imitation, with notification design as the current test case.