Hack lets you enable Personal Hotspot on your iPhone without jailbreaking

BY Jason

Published 8 Jul 2013

iphone-hotspot

Joseph Brown of iTweakiOS who has released hacked carrier bundles to boost download speeds, has just figured out a way to enable tethering (or the mobile Hotspot) feature on the iPhone without jailbreaking.

Many carriers currently charge a monthly fee for the mobile Hotspot feature, and it has been possible to use the feature unofficially using jailbreak apps such as PdaNet, MyWi.

There have also been a number of apps that have enabled tethering as an easter egg, but have been quickly removed from the App Store.

So it is quite a breakthrough that Joseph has managed to enable it without jailbreaking. He explains:

Many of you may remember a story I put out ahile back talking about how CommCenter blocks edited carrier.plist files. This happens because of the very thing we’re doing right now, which i suspect will likely be patched quickly by iOS 7 GM release. People were enabling tethering by modifying the original carrier.plist files and this stopped entirely when Apple implemented signatures into the carrier.plist files and creating what we all know as CommCenter which is the process that checks these signatures. So, the challenge was finding a way to enable it without CommCenter checks and verifications. After months of research and digging, I’ve finally found a genuine workaround to enable this great feature and its quite simple, really.

Joseph has tried this only on T-Mobile so far, but is quite confident that it will work for all GSM carriers. He says it may not be work on the CDMA iPhone as it handles APNs differently. The hack involves editing the tethering APN in one of the system files using application like iBackupBot.

You can head over to iTweakiOS for the step-by-step guide on how to enable tethering on your iPhone without jailbreaking.

As always, please don’t forget to let us know how it goes in the comments.