After waiting for approximately three months, owners of the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 rejoiced when hearing the news that iOS security researcher Pod2g and his development Dream Team had overcome all of the technical hurdles in front of them to get to a position where they could publicly distribute an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5. The ‘Corona’ untether had previously been released for owners of older A4 powered devices, but the lack of a usable exploit on the newer, dual-core A5 devices meant that the team had no way of injecting the necessary files.

The pursuit of the untethered iOS 5 jailbreak has been a non stop, full on roller coaster ride which started in November, and looks set to continue for the next week or so at least. The development past has been anything but smooth, and all involved have had to overcome a series of technical hurdles just to get to the position we find ourselves in.

After going through a relatively quiet patch during the latter months of 2011, the last three weeks have been a hive of jailbreaking activity. They say; you can have never have too much information, but there has been so many updates posted to blogs, and various Twitter accounts that in some circumstances it has been difficult to keep up. Let’s try and bring some sanity to the situation and see where we are at.

Although Chronic and iPhone Dev teams will rightfully take a share of the plaudits for releasing utilities enabling an untethered jailbreak on iOS 5.0.1, it was Corona, developed by pod2g, which made it all possible. Now the A4-only exploit is out in the open, he explains in a blog post exactly what Corona is, what it does, and how it has sped up the process to finding that elusive unmanned jailbreak.

It has been nearly eight weeks since the first declaration by pod2g that he had found a bug that he believed could provide an untethered jailbreak for iOS 5. We find ourselves exactly fifty days down the line, and what I imagine has been a lot of sleepless nights for the developers involved, but we now officially have the release of an untethered jailbreak for all A4 devices running iOS 5.0.1.