The jailbreak community received a bit of closure late Monday night after former Odyssey Team member and lead developer CoolStar formally announced that the Cheyote jailbreak for iOS & iPadOS 15.0-15.1.1 had been cancelled and that CoolStar was leaving the community for good.
The Odyssey Team shared the details via Twitter Monday night, linking to a Tumblr post that CoolStar herself wrote. The post detailed her decision to leave the jailbreak community and addresses the state of Cheyote despite CoolStar’s prior comment saying there would be a demo-able version by April 2023, which is essentially right now, and obviously won’t be happening.
The full blog post is quoted below, for archival reasons:
Leaving the jailbreak community
Around this time last year (in March 2022) I had updated my main iPhone to iOS 15.1, hoping to make a jailbreak for it. I fully expected to be gone from the scene after iOS 15.1, but knew full well that with all the mitigations of iOS 15.0 – 15.1 alone, it may already have been out of my means to make a jailbreak, so there was a risk.
By that time, I had already cut down the tweaks I used to just 2 — iPad dock for iPhone, and enabling battery percentage for notched iPhones.
Fast forward to June, and iOS 16 had natively introduced battery percentage for iPhones that have the notch — cutting down the number of tweaks I’d want (compared to stock) from 2 to 1. But no matter, I was still on iOS 15.1, and still hoping to make a jailbreak, since I had a working terminal at that point.
However, the months progressed — June became July, and iOS 16 betas were coming. Thanks to a donation from someone, I got an M1 Macbook Air to accelerate jailbreak development, and had gotten libhooker with tweaks running a couple weeks later, including on A12 and A13. The jailbreak at this point was in an extremely buggy, albeit functional state and hope was up.
Then the jailbreak community happened — without a PAC / PPL bypass at the time, libhooker would be forced to sign code pages — which was only really doable with the libhooker API (unless a ton of effort was spent on potential workarounds). But tweak developers largely refused to consider using the libhooker API for batching hooks, and I was quickly getting frustrated. And a lot of others from the community weren’t helping either — I had gotten harassed by many jailbreak users on twitter and reddit over this, especially since it had recently come to light that Cheyote was broken on A15. And of course, with it being August 2022, it was unlikely any donations at this point would even get an A15 device on early iOS 15.
At the same time, I had other interests popping up with porting Windows to various chromebooks — my port to AMD Ryzen was going well enough to be a daily driver, and I had just gotten audio working on the Pixel 2 chromebook (which I previously abandoned in 2017 but then picked up in 2022 with my new experience).
So I snapped — I realized how much better the community is on the chromebook side and that I simply didn’t need to put up with the jailbreak community. And I put Cheyote on the backburner to focus on developing Windows drivers for chromebooks.
Then August became September, November, December. Progress was being made on the chromebook scene, but every time I considered returning to doing iOS jailbreaking, I shuddered from remembering the harassment.
In December 2022, I returned the money donated towards the macbook to the person who donated it. Since I realized Cheyote was well beyond schedule, even if it ever came to happen. Meanwhile in the chromebook scene, I was getting Intel 12th gen audio working.
Then the months passed, and in March 2023 I realized it had been a full year. And I was still on iOS 15.1 for seemingly no reason other than to tease myself and miss out on the battery percentage and widgets — so I updated my main iPhone to iOS 16.3.1 (and now iOS 16.4), knowing that there was no turning back and that I would no longer be jailbroken on my main device for a long time, if ever.
That brings us to today. Even though I’ve been in denial about it for several months now, it clearly has made me feel a lot better to stay away from the jailbreak community, and I have found new interests that make me happier. So it’s time to say farewell. It’s been a good run overall since I started developing tweaks for iOS 5 (in 2012) and jailbreaks since iOS 11 (in 2017) — a 10 year run isn’t too bad after all.
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For those who are still waiting on Cheyote, unfortunately I wouldn’t hold my breath anymore. I’ve clearly moved on months ago, even though it’s taken me until now to fully realize it. I appreciate those who have supported me in the past and thank you for your support on my tweaks, Electra, Chimera, Odyssey and Taurine. If you’re still running one of the jailbreaks I’ve made — you’re a real one. libhooker and my repos will still be up and running for those on iOS 11 to iOS 14, and Sileo has been maintained by Amy for over a year now. I expect Odyssey and Taurine won’t need any more updates considering they’ve been running stable for a long time, and libhooker 1.6.9 will continue to be hosted on my repo since it is the last version to be fully validated up to iOS 14.8.1 (on checkm8) and up to iOS 14.3 (on Chimera -> Taurine).
If you were interested in what I’m up to these days, feel free to grab almost any Intel chromebook (or one of the 3 supported Ryzen 3000 chromebooks) from the last decade and put Windows on it! (Except the original Pixel 1 [no trackpad / touch screen] or Samsung Chromebook 3 — that one is garbage, sorry if you have it)
The Odyssey Team also announced final updates for the iOS 12-centric Chimera jailbreak and the iOS 13-centric Odyssey jailbreak. Chimera is adding support for iOS 12.5.7, while Odyssey is bundling the latest version of the Sileo package manager.
CoolStar once headed the development of the Sileo package manager app, but that project is now led by @elihwyma, so Sileo won’t be going anywhere anytime soon as it’s the primary package manager used by modern jailbreaks.
The Odyssey Team’s Tweets also reveal that @MasterMike88 and @dhinakg now have exclusive permission to provide kernel patches for iOS 12 should anything break in the now end of life (EOL) Chimera jailbreak.
Now that Cheyote is officially cancelled, this means that people will need to rely on alternative jailbreak solutions, which currently exist. This includes the checkm8-based palera1n jailbreak for A9-A11 devices running iOS & iPadOS 15.0-16.x, and the upcoming Fugu15 Max (working name) for A12+ devices running iOS & iPadOS 15.0-15.4.1. That said, Cheyote’s cancellation won’t affect too many people, especially as the focus of jailbreaking shifts to iOS & iPadOS 16.
The Odyssey Team’s Discord channel will remain open for users to comment and ask questions, as well as for the Odyssey Team to make any important announcements about their projects going forward.
It’s worth noting that CoolStar’s departure from the community is hard-hitting given her influence and longstanding contributions, but it wasn’t unexpected. Her interests had continually moved away from jailbreaking iPhones and closer to tinkering with other projects, which she had repeatedly said time and time again. That said, this should come as no surprise to anyone, even if it does invoke sad emotions.
Despite a lot of the drama that came with CoolStar’s projects and the arguments with other developers that ensued, there’s no ignoring that her contributions were large. We can all remember a time before Electra for iOS 11 was released when it felt like no one was making a jailbreak, and then Electra came. Soon after that, unc0ver came, stirring up fierce competition between the unc0ver and Electra Team that went on for years to come, involving even the Chimera and Odyssey Teams. Today, things are a little different, as there has been stereo silence from the unc0ver team.
The torch is being handed to the next generation of jailbreak developers who must now figure out the ins and outs of Apple’s security mechanisms and find a way to pwn Apple handsets in the face of departing veteran jailbreak developers, a feat that is currently being undertaken by the palera1n team and the developers behind Fugu15 Max and XinaA15. They’re already doing a great job, and we expect that things will slowly progress.
What are your thoughts about CoolStar’s departure from the jailbreak community and the cancellation of Cheyote? Be sure to let us know in the comments section down below.