Windows Phone 7 unlocker released

Well, this little thing is creating quite the storm:

http://www.chevronwp7.com/

"Today we have an exciting breakthrough for the Windows Phone 7 homebrew community - the ability for anyone to unlock a WP7 device without a Marketplace developer account.

Unlocking allows the sideloading of experimental applications that would otherwise can’t be published to the Marketplace, such as those which access private or native APIs.

We’ve taken the pain out of the process involved and put together a super simple executable that will allow anyone to unlock any WP7 device on the market using a USB cable and just a couple clicks.

This tool is completely safe and reversible for the phone. (The app even allows you to relock the phone.)"

It seems alot of people think this means the phone is Jailbroken - of course it does'nt - but I am interested in knowing what you guys think regarding the possibility of being able to actually sideload signed apps on the phone some day. Just how secure does everyone believe/know the platform to be?

Being a dev - thats not what I want unless they are released as freeware/shareware/or have paid.

Thoughts?

Excerpt from our new blog post

Unlocking and piracy are mutually exclusive
All Marketplace application XAP packages are sufficiently protected so that you cannot sideload to run them on any unlocked device (official or with our tool). We have no intentions or knowledge to break that protection.

That is awsome. not being able to load my own apps onto my own phone is actually kind of a deal breaker for me

its so strange to me that microsofts makes all the tools and training free to promote app development, and then doesnt let people run the apps they've written on their own phone winout paying 99 bucks a year..

its probably because of some stupid politics, but its great that it can be worked around now

40 minutes ago, longzheng wrote

Excerpt from our new blog post

Unlocking and piracy are mutually exclusive
All Marketplace application XAP packages are sufficiently protected so that you cannot sideload to run them on any unlocked device (official or with our tool). We have no intentions or knowledge to break that protection.

We'll see how long that lasts. Piracy is huge among iPhone jailbreakers.

@rhm:

but its not jailbroken in that sense.... its like saying that everyone who Does pay that $99 is esencially given a free piracy pass. All they do is enable that same functionality

pirating a wp7 app means breaking the xap encryption and this app certinly doesnt do that, as clearly stated by the developers i might add.

its like saying image mounting tools are responsible for pc/console piracy

@aL_:

Agreed, if MS leave this capability available to those who haven't paid the $99, it will mean GREAT things for the platform.

Now I can tinker with code for use within my department at work for example, and put it on other handsets of other staff - that was going to be too expensive to just play around with before (I assume through the $99 means you can only unlock 1 phone?).

It has nothing to do with piracy, but everything to do with getting people writing code for the platform - and to be honest - I dont understand why this functionality isn't available for everyone anyway.

If someone who had no intentention of selling apps via the marketplace is now able to do this, who knows, maybe they will realise the app they have made for themselves is actually sellable and pay the $99 to get it out there.

@Max Power:

That is exactly what i want to do microsoft seriously cant continue with the current approach for private apps, posting them on the marketplace. seriously? im going to bend our internal apps to conform to the marketplace rules, not to mention sharing them with everyone? no frickin way

i have no beef with microsoft charging for the certification, the hosting and the exposure in the marketplace, thats all good. but the deplyoment of private apps? that should have been a standard free feature from day one..

@Larry Osterman:

witch is this is not a "jailbreak"  this doenst give apps anything diffrent than apps deployed with the app hub subscription. in fact it is deploying apps with the app hub subscription. That is all this unlocker do. the name is a little unfortunate since people infer alot of things that it actually doesnt do.