--- title: Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone description: Demos were revealed at Hexacon in Paris, including a Signal 1-click demo and a demo involving iMessage. The thread also states that 'APT stands for Apple... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/today-we-hacked-what-we-d-set-out-to-hack-the-iphone-td31fdov4 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone | daily.dev og:description: Demos were revealed at Hexacon in Paris, including a Signal 1-click demo and a demo involving iMessage. The thread also states that 'APT stands for Apple... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/today-we-hacked-what-we-d-set-out-to-hack-the-iphone-td31fdov4 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/TD31FDov4.png og:image:alt: Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 1 min read · 2 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Demos were revealed at Hexacon in Paris, including a Signal 1-click demo and a demo involving iMessage. The thread also states that 'APT stands for Apple Persistent Threat'. Everything will be released in due time. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 195 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-23). **TL;DR:** Discussion barely engages with the hack itself, instead sprawling into a long debate about iOS lockdown vs. jailbreaking, monopoly power, and whether 'voting with your wallet' can actually curb Apple/Google's duopoly, with PDF-parsing security tangents and off-topic jokes about PHP. **Sentiment:** 10% positive · 35% mixed · 55% skeptical **The case for** - Some argue a tightly locked-down iPhone is a reasonable tradeoff given how much sensitive data (banking, 2FA, photos) phones now hold. - A few note that such exploits demonstrate why sandboxing and limiting rich document features (JS, image decoders) in PDF viewers would meaningfully reduce attack surface. **The pushback** - Many are frustrated that jailbreaking is effectively killed by forced updates and Apple's ability to detect and lock out jailbroken devices from iCloud/iMessage. - Several argue 'vote with your wallet' is naive against an entrenched duopoly and that only regulation or breakup could change things. - Commenters point out zero-click/one-click exploits delivered via PDFs and messaging apps make the 'no one forces you to jailbreak' argument beside the point, since attackers don't need you to jailbreak to compromise you. - Some worry rising AI inference costs could make only big players capable of hardening or exploiting software, disadvantaging smaller developers. **By community** - hackernews (heated): The actual hacking news is quickly overshadowed by a long, contentious argument about device freedom, monopoly power, and PDF security, with little direct commentary on the exploits themselves. **Hottest debate:** Whether locking down phones (no jailbreaking) is a justified security tradeoff or an unacceptable loss of user control enforced by monopolistic platforms. **Open questions** - Can 'voting with your wallet' meaningfully counter the Apple/Google duopoly, or is regulatory action the only real lever? - Would restricting PDF viewers to a minimal, 'dumb' feature set meaningfully reduce exploit risk without breaking legitimate use cases? - Will rising AI/compute costs make local security hardening or exploit development increasingly concentrated among big tech players? **Highlights** > "No one forces you..." is an interesting line to go down in the comments of an article that focuses on using messaging apps to deliver exploits to a cellphone. It's pretty malware adjacent. Isn't that sort of thing how Jamal Khashoggi and his friends, family, and coworkers were hacked before his murder/execution? > — [ribosometronome on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50212221) > We gave in because open source and hobbiests do not design good products and even worse shared systems, as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values. And shared systems require trust, planning, and goal setting in a way no open system would ever build. 1) They of course lack the resources 2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required 3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed. 4) The release schedule is laughable at best. > — [tsunamifury on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50212356) > PDFs are executables, that's why it's hard. They support running code, they support decoding images which themselves have their own custom compressors that are also basically code themselves. Anything to do with image formats is rife for bad decoders, insane compression algorithms from the 90s, and a PDF is basically 1000 formats inside many different container types with executable code plastered on everywhere. If you want to make a compatible PDF viewer you'll need to be able to implement an image decoder algorithm for a fax machine that was specific to Japan in the late 80s, which was somehow ratified into a standard and is used today by all the top legal firms, or something absurd like that. When you open a PDF on your computer, depending on how it is being parsed, it can even make outbound network connections without you knowing. To safely open a PDF you need one of those bomb proof suits, a disposable laptop, and even then you might be going home without eyebrows. > — [drum55 on hackernews · 4 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50211856) > Many things are stopping you. I see this response all the time as a counter to inappropriate behavior by monopolistic giant entities. It's the wrong way of thinking about the problem. The whole point is that they've gained too much market power for any individual to be able to stop them meaningfully, and that collective action using the power of government is the only way. Any argument that tries to talk people out of that is on the same side as the tech oligarchs, in my opinion. > — [CPLX on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50212564) > I want a device I can give the elderly in my family that they cannot be easily induced into doing insecure things on. If there were an unlockable iPhone and a locked iPhone I want to give them the latter. It’s not enough for me to tell them not to scroll to General and click seven times on About to activate developer mode. I would prefer to just give them a device that can’t do that. My own parents are still relatively young and my in-laws are sceptical enough of other people that it’s currently safe but it won’t be so forever. > — [arjie on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50212753) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50211474) · 321 points · 195 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How to Detect & Block Spyware Before It Hits You](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-detect-block-spyware-before-it-hits-you-2gw2crh3d) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [A new unpatchable flaw in Apple chips opens the door to an iPhone jailbreak](https://daily.dev/posts/a-new-unpatchable-flaw-in-apple-chips-opens-the-door-to-an-iphone-jailbreak-qqrtgimnp) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [iPhone 18 secrets spill onto the dark web](https://daily.dev/posts/iphone-18-secrets-spill-onto-the-dark-web-csc3qgk6k) · TechCentral · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#apple](https://daily.dev/tags/apple), [#ios](https://daily.dev/tags/ios) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/today-we-hacked-what-we-d-set-out-to-hack-the-iphone-td31fdov4) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Today, we hacked what we'd set out to hack: the iPhone","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/today-we-hacked-what-we-d-set-out-to-hack-the-iphone-td31fdov4","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/today-we-hacked-what-we-d-set-out-to-hack-the-iphone-td31fdov4"},"datePublished":"2026-10-23T16:53:27.400Z","dateModified":"2026-10-23T17:59:50.452Z","description":"Demos were revealed at Hexacon in Paris, including a Signal 1-click demo and a demo involving iMessage. 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