iPhone Dev Interview: DarkMalloc [Creator Of OpenPwn/iOS Hacker And Developer]

Our iPhone Dev interview series continues this week, with DarkMalloc. He is the creator of OpenPwn, and a respected figure in the jailbreak community. If you haven’t heard of him, well, that’s what we’re here for!

Introduce yourself: Who are you? Where you from?

My name is Joshua Lee Tucker, better known as DarkMalloc on the internet and within the iPhone hacking scene. I’m a 15-year old developer, hacker and entrepreneur from Wales, UK. I enjoy programming (obviously) and I enjoy freestyle skiing in my free time.

What projects are you known for, Cydia and/or App Store?

I’ve released various small, open-source iPhone projects which I’ve pushed onto GitHub. Mostly iPhone related like darksn0w, Aidar and LockSpring and some non-iPhone related like Cynect. I wrote a small game called ‘Twoosh’ that’s in the app store although I admit I’m capable of much more right now, as I wrote Twoosh whilst I was still learning Objective-C. I really enjoy working on small projects, especially if it’s a collaborative work with online friends. Working with people you enjoy spending time with really does make a project much more fun.

Do you develop for other platforms besides iOS? If so, which ones?

Yes, I also develop for the web. I enjoy programming in PHP because of it’s similarity with C and also because of it’s rich feature-set. I’m currently working on a great project with Michael Goss (@lyetz) and Andree Blixt (@andreeblixt). Both Michael and Andree are really great people and are awesome fun to work with.

How did you get into programming/coding/app development?

I originally started programming in .NET but I then moved on to programming in C and C++ because of how much more low-level it is and because it gives you much more control over what is happening. I decided to try and get into iPhone development because I found the idea of being able to create an app and being able to distribute it via an app store that is used by so many people an amazing opportunity.

For those who don’t know about “OpenPwn”, can you explain what this is?

OpenPwn (http://OpenPwn.org) is a great open-source iPhone payload community where we share ideas, write code and share code that exploits public vulnerabilities in iPhone software like iBoot. There’s some great people on the forums, and we all open-source anything we create for other people to learn from and enjoy.

Any other cool projects coming up, that you can tell us about?

We’ve been working on a project for a small while that will allow everyone to have their own high-quality iPhone application for a very low cost. We feel that there is a good opportunity for this because many people haven’t got the ability to create a functional iPhone application but neither have they got the money to pay a developer that charges a ridiculous amount for their services.

What’s your view on the state of iPhone jailbreaking/unlocking today? It seems to be getting more and more mainstream. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

I honestly feel that jailbreaking becoming mainstream is a bad thing and does nothing but damage the existing community. An example of this is geohot recently leaving the scene. He did so because of the ridiculous amount of pressure and expectation placed on him by people that have no idea what kind of work goes into creating a jailbreak. By jailbreaking becoming mainstream, this will continue to happen and I believe it will get worse. Remember, none of us do this because we have do; we do it for fun.

Do you have an opinion on the rumor that geohot will eventually release a tool that uses the exploit he found earlier this year?

I don’t believe geohot will release a tool. I believe he will (if he hasn’t already) share his exploit with the Chronic-Dev Team or the iPhone Dev Team. I feel that although he has the communities’ interest at heart, he has lost interest in creating jailbreak tools completely. I have to say, if I was in his position I would feel the same way.

So, you finally got an iPhone 4. What’s your first impressions? How’s your antenna?

Yes, I finally have my iPhone 4! I’m really enjoying it, I think the speed and memory is phenomenal. I’m able to run pretty much all the apps on my iPhone in the background. It really is amazing. I’m able to reproduce the antennagate issue (as everyone is :P), but it doesn’t affect me in terms of daily usage. See the video at the bottom for the awesome song. ;)

What’s the app/game your using/playing the most right now?

I’m finding myself using Spotify the most at the moment as I’m one of the lucky guys in the UK who can get Spotify, which is much better than rdio which is available in the US. The app really is much better since the guys over at Spotify have added the ability to listen to and sync music in the background.

Blue pill or the red pill?

Red Pill.

Big thanks to DarkMalloc for the great interview. We hope to keep bringing these interviews to you each week. If you are an iPhone Dev, or you know one who may want to be interviewed by iJailbreak.com, contact us!

Check out our past interviews:

• Grant Paul (chpwn)
• Ryan Petrich