Apple reportedly disabling Siri on unauthorized devices

When the iPhone 4S and Siri were announced, there was a flurry of activity amongst hackers and developers who were curious to see if they could port Siri onto non-iPhone 4S devices. While they have managed to do that, the process involved is a rather long one as it involves a jailbroken iOS device and users are required to set up their own SiriProxy server. However it looks like the joy and novelty of using Siri on a non-iPhone 4S might be short lived as Apple appears to have taken steps to disable Siri on unauthorized devices.

There have been reports that users who have Siri installed on non-iPhone 4S devices who claims that it no longer works. Upon further investigation, it seems that the cause of this problem is a certain “SetActivationToken” property list file which disables attempts to communicate with Siri’s servers.

Not all is lost though as there are reports of non-iPhone 4S users claiming that simply deleting the com.apple.assistant.plist file from the jailbroken iOS device’s var/mobile/Library/Preferences/ folder fixes the issue. It seems rather straightforward and simple, and while we don’t really have a chance to try that out ourselves, we’d love to hear from our readers who are experiencing such issues and if the solution worked for them.

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Cellphones
Tags: iPhone 4S, Siri