The developer community hasn't been squashed at all. The 'hacking' that causes the iPhone to brick is tampering with the SIM card interface. That's in firmware,

The developer community hasn't been squashed at all. The 'hacking' that causes the iPhone to brick is tampering with the SIM card interface. That's in firmware, and it's sort of to be expected that if you change things there, and then apply an Apple patch without changing things back, things might break. But third-party apps still work, by all reports I've read, as long as you haven't tried to unlock the phone to work on other providers.