It hasn’t been that many days since Apple released iOS 13.5, which I called the COVID-19 update, but yesterday Apple released iOS 13.5.1 and iPadOS 13.5.1 When Apple releases an update that close to a prior update, you know that it must be to address some sort of bug. In this case, it was a security update, which Apple says addresses a “memory consumption issue” that resulted in an app being able to “execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.” It was well-known that there was some kind of security flaw in iOS 13.5 because many websites, such as Lifehacker, offered instructions for how to jailbreak an iPhone running iOS 13.5.
In the very early days of the iPhone, I know that some folks had a legitimate reason to jailbreak an iPhone — i.e., bypass the normal iPhone security to do something that the iPhone is not designed to do. For example, it used to be impossible to show off everything on an iPhone screen on an external monitor. Folks who wanted to teach people how to use an iPhone would sometimes jailbreak an iPhone to connect it to a projector and mirror everything on the screen. Of course, that particular feature has been part of iOS for a long time now.
Nowadays, some folks jailbreak just to tinker around with the iPhone, but the most popular reason to jailbreak is to run pirate software (often games) that a user has not paid for. And the potential downside of jailbreaking is huge; you make your device vulnerable to malware that would not be a threat to a normal iPhone, and also risk making it not work correctly. If you are using your iPhone or iPad to get work done, and especially if you are an attorney with confidential information on your device, I strongly discourage jailbreaking and I strongly encourage installing security updates whenever Apple releases them.