Following the lead of the Sileo Team’s decision to end support for the XinaA15 jailbreak this past weekend, it now seems that the popular Zebra package manager is going down the same path.
In a post shared on the Mastodon platform this week, the Zebra team announced a similar decision, quoted below:
I think everyone figured out this was the case anyway, but based on Sileo deciding to end support for XinaA15, we’re going to clarify that Zebra is no longer planning to support it.
We’re extremely grateful for Xina’s work, and the semi-rootless nature of XinaA15 helped start pushing tweak developers onto the road to “proper” rootless. Sadly, to trick rootful binaries into working rootlessly involves a bunch of hacks, and trying to make that work with every package was always going to be a challenge. There were quite some difficulties working around the weird edge cases, even in the latest version of XinaA15, after many of us worked with Xina to get bugs fixed.
One of the most broken components was APT/dpkg, which weren’t correctly compiled for semi-rootless. It was @anamy’s incredible work that allowed XinaA15 to have a working package manager at all, even if it wasn’t perfect.
Now, we have palera1n and Fugu15 Max taking us to the next stage of rootless jailbreaks, so this is the extremely rare time that it seems right to stop supporting a specific jailbreak.
“Proper” rootless is a pain in the butt, we know. Not everything is updated yet, we know. But it’s worth the trouble for a healthier package ecosystem.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk. Zebra 1.1.31 bug fix update coming shortly by the way.
The gist of the post is that while the Zebra team is extremely grateful for @xina520’s hard work, the hacky nature of attempting to get rootful binaries to work on a rootless jailbreak as XinaA15 had done caused a lot of headaches for fixing bugs and making other software work flawlessly. And in fact, Amy While of the Sileo Team echoed a similar sentiment when deciding to end Sileo’s support for XinaA15.
Many regular users who aren’t developers and who haven’t experienced the displeasure of trying to support XinaA15 may quickly critique these teams’ decisions, but without understanding the inner mechanisms of what’s involved with making these tools and trying to support a jailbreak with so much happening under the hood, only the project developers can really justify these decisions.
It’s worth noting that the Fugu15 Max jailbreak for arm64e devices running iOS & iPadOS 15.0-15.4.1, which will eventually become named something different when it comes out of public beta, has been recommended as an alternative to XinaA15. Furthermore, talks about XinaA15 being cancelled because of Fugu15 Max’s ongoing progress have further recommended the push to Fugu15 Max.
While it’s unfortunate to see a jailbreak fall through the cracks, the developers know when another project will yield better results for end users, which is the case for Fugu15 Max, as it supports more firmware than XinaA15 does and appears to be easier to develop for, especially given the strong push toward the rootless jailbreaking dynamic.
Are you upset to see that Zebra will no longer support the XinaA15 jailbreak? You can let us know in the comments section down below.