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When version 1.1.2 of the iPhone’s firmware was announced, there was nothing worthwhile in the patch, and when 1.1.3 came along, none of the great new features were that appealing given that they were already duplicated on my 1.1.1 iPhone via third-party applications. Nonetheless, after a curious inability to stay asleep at 04:00 AM this morning, I decided that I’d tackle the question of upgrading once and for all.

The iPhone hacking community still hasn’t fully embraced upgrading previously unlocked iPhones to 1.1.3, though there’s been promising news in regards to unlocking out-of-box iPhones running 1.1.3, thanks in great part to a little application called ZiPhone. The immediate downside of ZiPhone, however, was that it was limited to working on iPhones with the 4.6 bootloader. For those that don’t know what this means, just understand that older iPhones, many of which were unlocked when running older firmware revisions, used bootloader 3.9. When I woke up this morning and decided to tackle upgrading my iPhone, ZiPhone 2.0 wasn’t out yet, so I had to find an alternate route.

What I initially attempted to do was upgrade my iPhone by way of the soft upgrade available through Installer.app, but this was a poor decision, since I didn’t first move to version 1.1.2, resulting in an iPhone that simply wouldn’t boot, and simply flashed annoyingly. Not convinced that I had bricked my iPhone, and held down the power and home buttons and put the phone into restore mode. While a number of online posts claimed that upgrading to 1.1.3 via iTunes would destroy any chance of unlocking the phone, I had little choice at this point. Fortunately for me, the 1.2 version of ZiPhone I used activated and jailbroke my iPhone, even though it was unsuccessful at unlocking it. This is where iClarified and their Installer.app source came in, as I was able to bring up the latest “unofficial” version of AnySim (1.3).

Alas, my timing was unbelievably poor, as iClarified went down due to bandwidth issues, and though I was able to find a copy of AnySim 1.3 online and manually copy it over to my iPhone, the version I found didn’t work. Many hours later, after having a chance to take another stab at obtaining AnySim 1.3 via iClarified, I was able to overwrite the bad version I manually installed. This raised a new problem, however: AnySim refused to acknowledge that my iPhone’s auto-lock was already set to “Never”.

The solution to this problem was ultimately found on HowardForums and posted by user wick3d-G:

1. Set “Auto-Lock” to “Never”
2. Rename /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist to /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist.old
3. Copy /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist to /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist
4. Set “Airplane mode” to ON.
5. run anySIM 1.3 (now it should run smoothly)
6. rename /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist.old to /var/root/Library/Preferences/com.apple.springboard.plist
7. turn “Airplane mode” OFF

The actual copying/renaming was something I completed using SFTP, as I had re-installed OpenSSH on my iPhone via Installer.app earlier. After running AnySim 1.3, my iPhone was unlocked again, and restoring from my backup in iTunes, my songs, text messages, et al were put back where they belonged.

Ironically, had I simply waited to upgrade tonight, the latest version of ZiPhone would have handled everything for me without the headache, though of interesting note is that I was able to use iTunes for the actual upgrade, rather than utilize a soft upgrade via Installer.app.

It’ll take me a few minutes to put all my third-party applications back on the iPhone, but it’s nice to be up-to-date on Apple’s native iPhone features, even if they’re not much better than what I could accomplish before. At this point, it seems that the iPhone hacking community is in a solid position to unlock any iPhone out there, regardless of bootloader or modem firmware version. That is, until firmware 1.1.4 comes out.

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