For the past several years, the overwhelming majority of jailbreaks have been semi-untethered, meaning that you could still use a handset hacked liberated by said tools after a reboot, albeit in a non-jailbroken state.
The lack of untethered jailbreaks — or those that remain fully jailbroken following a reboot — has been a pain point for jailbreakers for as long as anyone can remember. For that reason, a Tweet shared by @LinusHenze Monday afternoon might be of particular interest…
The latest round of Apple software updates brings fixes for vulnerabilities making possible recent zero-click attacks that bypassed Apple's BlastDoor security in Messages. iOS 14.8 includes security fixes for two bugs that have been actively exploited in the wild. Do yourself a big favor and install the latest updates to close this particularly dangerous attack vector.
Apple didn't do the traditional beta seeding for this release, but there were hints that Apple was working on a new software version of iOS ahead of the much more anticipated iOS 15. And, it turns out that is indeed the case.
Today, Apple has released iOS 14.8, iPadOS 14.8, watchOS 7.6.2, and macOS 11.6 Big Sur to the public. While the version number would suggest something big, that's not really going to be the case. This is meant to be the final version of iOS 14 released to the public, so it's not necessarily meant to add any major new features to the mix.
Just a couple of days ago, the Odyssey Team shared that it was already investing in test devices for iOS & iPadOS 15 jailbreak development. The announcement was accompanied by a photograph of an iPod touch that had been custom engraved with the words “Odyssey Team” on the back.
More recently, Odyssey Team lead developer CoolStar took to the Sileo / Taurine / Odyssey Discord channel to share that libhooker — the tweak injection method utilized by the Chimera, Odyssey, and Taurine jailbreaks for iOS 12, 13, and 14 respectively — was mostly working on iOS 15 beta 8.
At iDownloadBlog, we continue to cover new jailbreak tweak releases and jailbreak-centric news on a daily basis despite the annual pre-event lull. But life often keeps us so busy that keeping up with everything new proves to be a challenging endeavor.
The most current jailbreak tools available to the public today are Taurine and unc0ver, each of which are capable of jailbreaking devices running up to and including iOS or iPadOS 14.3. Several iPhone and iPad software updates later, and we’re currently residing at iOS & iPadOS 14.7.1 with a public iOS & iPadOS 15 release looming just over the horizon.
Having said that, the elephant in the room would be the blazingly-obvious question: where are all the jailbreak-viable exploits for iOS 14.4 and later?
The Sileo Team released yet another update to the Sileo package manager for jailbroken iPhones and iPads this week, this time bringing it up to version 2.2.5.
At iDownloadBlog, we make it our mission to enhance jailbreak tweak discovery for our readers. That’s because we know how difficult it can be to find the best jailbreak tweaks to meet the needs of your unique workflow, and we’re dedicated to making this hunt more approachable.
We regularly share what we think are some of the best jailbreak tweaks for specific facets of iOS and/or iPadOS 14, and today, we’ll show you what we believe are some of the best ways to enhance the ever-so-popular YouTube app for iPhone and iPad.
If you use any of the CoolStar-led jailbreaks, including Chimera for iOS 12, Odyssey for iOS & iPadOS 13, or Taurine for iOS & iPadOS 14, then there’s a good chance that you’re using libhooker for tweak injection, which is the intricate process that lets installed jailbreak tweaks work their magic on your handset’s operating system.
While CoolStar regularly updates libhooker with improvements, CoolStar just this past weekend opted to launch a public beta of a new libhooker build dubbed libhooker v1.6.9 beta 1 to allow voluntary testers to try the latest features before they roll out to the general public by way of an official update.
Just under a week ago, the Dynastic Repo repository announced a planned shutdown that would occur sometime next year. Dynastic Repo also noted that it would roll out an archival program that would continue hosting existing tweaks and let users download those tweaks that are already hosted there. Free tweaks would be enrolled in the archival program automatically, while paid tweaks would either need to opt-in to it or move to another repository altogether.
The announcement also included an excerpt pertaining specifically to the popular paid ShortLook jailbreak tweak, which was created by several developers associated with Dynastic Repo including Ayden Panhuyzen, Jamie Bishop, and José Hernandez. Given the upcoming archival program, those developers decided that ShortLook would be made free inline with the upcoming changes. Interestingly enough, however, ShortLook went free much sooner than expected…
Many jailbreak tweak developers will be familiar with Theos, which is best described as a cross-platform suite of tools for developing software for the iOS and iPadOS platforms without the use of Xcode. The reason for Theos’ familiarity is that it has proven to be a particularly instrumental mechanism in the development of jailbreak tweaks over the years.
Just this weekend, however, the Theos team took to /r/jailbreak to announce Orion, a new and open-source DSL that will empower developers to more easily craft jailbreak tweaks using Apple’s renowned Swift programming language.
Although jailbreak tweak releases were somewhat lean this past week, the community made up for that with what felt like a substantial amount of exciting jailbreak-centric news breaks.