The jailbreak community has been nothing but a crazy roller coaster ride lately, especially given the lack of any recent jailbreaks and the permanent archival of both the ModMyi and ZodTTD/MacCiti Cydia repositories. On the other hand, there may (or may not) be exciting news ahead.
While it’s too premature to make any conclusive assumptions at this point in time, there’s been some buzz recently about a couple of iOS exploits that could purportedly pave the way for a so-called “semi-jailbreak” for iOS 11.0-11.1.2.
Sounds exciting, right? That’s what we thought too, but don’t get your panties in a knot just yet. There’s actually more to the story than meets the eye.
One of the first tweets to set off the chain reaction of excitement in the jailbreak community came by way of Ian Beer, who cited his tfp0 security exploit as a potential springboard for something special:
The beautiful part of a tfp0 exploit is that it doesn’t make any modifications to the kernel inside of its “protected areas,” so it shouldn’t set off any red flags for Apple‘s Kernel Panic Protection. With that in mind, his exploit should theoretically work on the iPhone 7 and later, in addition to older devices.
While we don’t know much else about Beer’s exploit, we do know that he plans to release part of it soon.
Having exploits is a great thing, but developing a user-friendly jailbreak tool for the public that installs Cydia is an entirely different venture altogether. While there may be an exploit or two available for use, a talented hacker/developer would still need to bundle it all together with a user-friendly Cydia installer and add some odds and ends to make a publicly usable jailbreak capable of running jailbreak tweaks.
Because no one has completed the second bit yet, we have nothing but a valuable exploit at the moment. Nevertheless, it works on iOS 11.0-11.1.2, so if you have any desire to jailbreak iOS 11, then it might be a good idea to get your device(s) on iOS 11.1.2 as soon as humanly possible.
Should you upgrade from a jailbroken installation of iOS 10 to iOS 11? Good question…
Personally, I wouldn’t. If you’re already comfortably jailbroken on iOS 10, then why risk losing your jailbreak over something that might never materialize? On the other hand, if you’re already running iOS 11, then you really don’t have anything to lose by putting your device on iOS 11.1.2.
Apple still signs iOS 11.1.2 as of this writing, but things won’t stay that way forever. That said, it might be worth downgrading if you have a newer firmware installed, or upgrading if you have a non-jailbroken older firmware installed; this prepares your device just in case something materializes in the future.
Just to reiterate, there’s no jailbreak for iOS 11 as of yet, and there’s no guarantee that an iOS 11 jailbreak will ever materialize. Nevertheless, everything we see right now indicates that iOS 11.1.2 is where everyone should aim to be.
Given that Apple just released iOS 11.2 recently, the iOS 11.1.2 signing window is likely to close very soon. If you’d like to downgrade or upgrade your device, you should probably move forward with it as soon as possible and keep your fingers crossed for good news.
Do you think we’ll see a jailbreak for iOS 11? Let us know in the comments section below.