First Legal Siri Port, ‘Spire’, Gets Released

Earlier this month, we passed along a warning that urged the overlooking of current Siri ports, as some could either risk causing issues or end up handing over mass amounts of personal information to people you don’t know. Well, that worry is no longer, as Spire, a brand-new Siri port, doesn’t suffer the same problems. That’s thanks to the fact that It gets its code straight from Apple – which also makes Spire a legal port.

Legal port or not, since it hasn’t been in Apple’s interest to port Siri to non 4S phones itself, we’re sure that the company is not thrilled with this progression. If the company really wanted to, it could release new firmware that would outright block Siri from certain devices, but doing so would accomplish little. And for that matter, the port requires a jailbroken iPhone, so Apple’s options are limited in the matter.

That said, there is one small caveat: a proxy server must be set once Siri is downloaded and installed. The reason for this is that Apple’s official Siri servers are designed to talk specifically to an iPhone 4S. How would one get hold of a proxy server? Unfortunately, this is where things get murky.

To obtain a proxy server you could ask a 4S-wielding friend for their authentication tokens, but given the term “authentication”, I am not sure I’d ever want to give up information like that. There are a couple of other solutions, but none are that simple.

Given the clear demand for Siri, it’s a bit surprising Apple hasn’t made the software available for non-4S iPhones. Or perhaps not, given Siri is one of the major features touted for it. Such is business.