From Vice back in 2021:
After pushback on only allowing web apps for the iPhone, Steve Jobs announced that native apps would be coming to the iPhone. In the interim, Apple Senior Vice President Scott Forstall invited Tim Westergren and his CTO, Tom Conrad, over to a local Cupertino lunch spot….
“What, if anything, can we do at Pandora to get ready for the next generation of iPhone that includes an app store and native APIs?” asked Conrad. “Forstall said, it wouldn’t be a waste of your time to jailbreak some iPhones and use the kind of back door toolkits that were being distributed by other people to build a native Pandora app while we get our act together at Apple on something more formal.”
The story covers a broader topic, but the above quote caught my attention.
Forstall was only a single rung down the ladder from Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the time. I was in my teen years when this played out and I recall the angst and consternation which surrounded iOS jailbreaking. I may have jailbroken an iPod Touch to install some sort of cool system UI that Apple itself would never have approved. The moral “outrage” then about how jailbreaking was akin to violating Apple ring hollow in light of Forstall telling another company “hey, just jailbreak the thing.”