Dev Team Releases Important A5 Jailbreak Details

We know. We’re as eager for the A5 jailbreak to drop as you guys are. Probably more. But even though we’ve been saying it for weeks now, we think we’re extremely close to a public release.

And The Dev Team confirms that in its new blog post entitled “Corona A5 jailbreak nearly ready to pop!” The post provides some important information regarding the highly-anticipated exploit…

“Due to the combined efforts of @pod2g and members of the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team, we’re nearly ready for a general release! All technical hurdles dealing with the underlying technique have been overcome, and its now all about making the jailbreak as bug free as possible…

Jailbreak programs:

To be as flexible as possible, the A5 version of the corona jailbreak will take multiple forms:

  • Chronic Dev have incorporated the overall flow into a GUI that runs on your Mac or PC. The goal is for the GUI to be enough for most cases.
  • iPhone Dev have incorporated the exact same flow into a command-line interface (CLI). This will allow us to help users through individual steps of the jailbreak manually, to both help the user and help improve the overall flow. Although the CLI will also allow the user to perform the entire jailbreak from beginning to end, we anticipate it will be more useful in debugging the occasional errors. The CLI currently has over 20 individual options (in addition to the single “jailbreak” option) that should be useful during debug after the GUI release.
  • Once all the bugs in the flow are worked out, we’ll also incorporate it into the redsn0w GUI (but still leave the CLI freely available too). In order to maximize the chances of the jailbreak working for everyone, the redsn0w GUI will use native Apple iTunes libraries — this technique is slightly different than how the Chronic Dev GUI handles communications, and should provide nice combined coverage for all the odd computer configurations out there.

Firmware:

The supported firmware versions will be:

  • iPhone 4S: 5.0 (9A334), 5.0.1 (9A405) and the “other” 5.0.1 (9A406)
  • iPad 2: 5.0.1 (9A405)

iPhone 4S owners looking to maximize their chances of achieving an eventual software-based carrier unlock should be staying at 5.0. Everyone else should be at 5.0.1. If you’re an iPhone 4S owner who already updated to 5.0.1, it’s too late to go back down to 5.0. But if you’re on 9A406 it is possible to downgrade the BB by going to the 9A405 version of 5.0.1 while the window is still open.”

The post goes on to warn that this style of jailbreak has never been done before. So, as usual, it’s highly recommended that you backup your device and take other necessary precautions.

It’s also worth noting that a shared PayPal account has been setup for all of those involved in the A5 jailbreak. So if you’d like to make a donation, you can do so here. And as hard as these guys have been working, it’d be money well spent.

Make sure you stay tuned to iDB this weekend — we’re expecting the jailbreak to drop any day now.