Pangu: untethered jailbreak is not coming for iOS 9.3.3

Pangu iOS 7.1.1

The Pangu jailbreak team is the one responsible for having released the iOS 9.3.3 jailbreak, and there has been a lot of confusion about the jailbreak that has led the team to ultimately make an official Reddit account to help keep the community in the loop.

The team recently cleared up the question on whether or not 32-bit devices would ever be supported by the iOS 9.3.3 jailbreak, and now they appear to have confirmed that an untethered jailbreak for iOS 9.3.3 isn’t going to happen.

iOS 9.3.3 will stay semi-untethered

We’ve been seeing comment after comment in the various postings we do here on iDB on the new jailbreak about how people want to wait to jailbreak iOS 9.3.3 until an untethered jailbreak for the firmware is released instead of using this rather odd semi-untethered jailbreak that utilizes certificates. The semi-untethered boot process isn’t hard, but it can be inconvenient.

Without a doubt, people seem to agree that the hassle of side-loading the jailbreak app is too much of a pain to have to do every time the certificate expires. Unfortunately for those waiting on an untethered jailbreak, Pangu has confirmed on Reddit that one for iOS 9.3.3 is not being worked on, so you might not want to hold your breath:

Pangu Denies Untethered iOS 9.3.3 jailbreak

The news doesn’t come as very surprising, as we’ve suspected since the release of this strange type of jailbreak that perhaps Pangu is saving something bigger and better for iOS 10 when it’s released to the public this Fall.

It’s completely possible that we’ll see an untethered jailbreak for iOS 10 from Pangu and that they’ve used exploits in this jailbreak that may have been closed in iOS 10, which could be why they decided to go ahead and use them so close to the iOS 10 release. This is, of course, nothing more than speculation, so take it with a grain of salt.

To jailbreak or not to jailbreak

With the latest intelligence we’ve acquired, we know that that there are three kinds of certificates that you can use with the Pangu jailbreak for iOS 9.3.3. By far the most stable method is side-loading the app to your device with your own $99/year developer account and not having to worry about side-loading again for a whole year.

Of course, there remain two other certificate types: a free one that lasts 7 days, and the enterprise developer certificate from 25PP that can supposedly last a year.

The first one is just a pain to deal with because you have to side-load the jailbreak app with Cydia Impactor every week. The second one shows more promise, but because Apple revoked the Beijing enterprise developer certificate shortly after its release with the iOS 9.3.3 jailbreak, there’s no telling whether or not the jailbreak will stop functioning before the supposed “year” is over.

It seems as though you are going to be stuck with a semi-untethered jailbreak for iOS 9.3.3 no matter which direction you take, but it all comes down to how convenient you want your certificate to be, as this will help ease the convenience factor of the jailbreak for you.

There is a difference between renewing the certificate with Cydia Impactor and booting semi-untethered. Both are processes that this jailbreak requires and both have their own separate steps to be performed.

At no point during this jailbreak should you have to ‘re-jailbreak’ your device over and over again, unless of course something goes catastrophically wrong and you have to restore your device, but you will have to re-side-load the app every so often and you will also need to run the Home screen-based jailbreak app every time you reboot to re-enable Cydia and all your jailbreak tweaks.

Wrapping up

Since we will not be seeing an untethered jailbreak for iOS 9.3.3, many people who have been waiting on one are probably going to be disappointed. Nevertheless, a jailbreak is a jailbreak and the community has been asking for one for the latest versions of iOS 9 for a long time, so it’s not all bad; at least we have something.

Also read:

Has this announcement impacted your decision to jailbreak iOS 9.3.3 at all? Share in the comments!