If you’ve been following jailbreaking in the past year, then you’ve undoubtedly heard about the XinaA15 jailbreak. It was around long before Dopamine was and supported iOS & iPadOS 15.0-15.1.1 devices, but it used arguably hacky methods to maintain a rootful-like user experience that eventually earned it deprecation in the community due to the community moving full-force over to rootless.
But things seem to be changing for the better this weekend, as XinaA15 developer Zhu Xinlang (@xina520) released version 2 of XinaA15 that appears to be a completely different type of jailbreak. Posts shared to X (formerly Twitter) early Sunday morning by both Xinlang and Dopamine lead developer Lars Fröder (@opa334dev) reveal more about the new XinaA15 v2 project.
As it would appear, XinaA15 makes use of Linus Henze’s Fugu15 Rootful developer jailbreak, which was publicized just before Henze’s departure from the jailbreak community and repository archival, except that it makes use of certain techniques that the open-source Dopamine jailbreak also uses to make it a rootless-compatible jailbreak.
Specifically, Fröder says the techniques that XinaA15 v2 and Dopamine both use are the bind mounts /usr/lib for patching dyld, but everything else utilized by XinaA15 v2 appears to be based on the Fugu15 Rootful jailbreak.
XinaA15 v2 also appears to make use of kfd exploit-based vulnerabilities, and since it makes use of Fugu15, it supports iOS & iPadOS 15.0-15.4.1, which is a step up from the previous iOS & iPadOS 15.0-15.1.1 support of the original XinaA15 v1.
It’s interesting that Xinlang went this direction with XinaA15 v2, as Henze’s Fugu15 Rootless jailbreak was already available and was already rootless by nature, but it could be said that using Fugu15 Rootful and many of its techniques makes XinaA15 v2 unique from the existing Dopamine jailbreak.
So far, early adopters have praised XinaA15 v2 for its capabilities. Fröder said that while the original XinaA15 was a somewhat janky patchwork, v2 is completely different as it properly supports rootless jailbreak tweaks.
What’s more is that XinaA15 v2 ships with the Sileo package manager app instead of Saily, which many users will appreciate. Saily gets installed alongside Sileo, but it can be removed by the user after the fact. As for tweak injection, XinaA15 v2 uses CoolStar’s libhooker instead of eveiyneee’s ElleKit.
At least one Redditor has claimed that XinaA15 v2’s libhooker implementation lowers memory usage when compared to Dopamine, however the Spinlock Timeout Panic issue is still a problem and appears to be less noticeable on Dopamine than on XinaA15 v2. For those unaware, a Spinlock Timeout Panic causes a pink screen and reboot for seemingly no reason at all.
Since many of us thought that we’d probably never hear about the XinaA15 jailbreak again, today’s news is a pleasant surprise that reminds us that people are still out there and looking for ways to hack and exploit iPhones and iPads despite Apple’s attempts to thwart jailbreaking. While it’s not an iOS or iPadOS 16 jailbreak, it’s a step forward from where we were previously.
It will be interesting to see how the XinaA15 v2 project fares against Dopamine as the two jailbreaks pretty much support the same firmware. The current version of XinaA15 v2 at the time of this writing can be had from a link shared in the developer’s post on X.
Do you plan to give the new XinaA15 v2 jailbreak a try, or will you be keeping your Dopamine installation? Let us know in the comments section down below.