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.
It seems like we are not too far off now from a public release of an untethered jailbreak for both iPhone 4S and iPad 2. Pod2g, who is the genius behind this iOS 5 exploit for both A4 and A5 devices, has posted a video on his blog which shows jailbroken iPhone 4S running Cydia, on iOS 5.0.1, fully untethered.
The battle between Apple and jailbreak development teams has been going on for a number of years now, and with the recent release of an untethered jailbreak for A4 devices, and the impending release of an A5 version, it is unlikely it will end anytime soon. However, I think even the main developers and hackers would admit to being a little naive if they thought that the process wasn't getting a little more difficult with every iOS release.
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.
The cat and mouse game between the engineers at Apple and the people that provide us with jailbreaks is turning into more of a war than a game. For as long as I can remember, the production of a jailbreak for new devices and firmwares has always had stumbling blocks, but rarely has it thrown as many obstacles in the way as the current pursuit of the A5 jailbreak. We are only eight weeks away from the the iPad 2’s first birthday, and in that time we have only seen an untethered jailbreak possible on iOS 4.3.3 using JailbreakMe 3.0.
For those of you who have been involved in the jailbreaking community for quite some time, you will no doubt be familiar with the legendary hacker known as PlanetBeing. His real name is Yiduo David Wang, and at one point he was one of the core members of the iPhone Dev Team alongside the likes of MuscleNerd. Obviously we all know the former as one of the biggest names involved in providing baseband hacks and device unlocks, whereas Wang was more focused on the actual jailbreaks.
I woke up this morning, collected my iPhone from my bedside table and opened up my favorite Twitter application to browse through my timeline, just like I do every morning. Some tweet I skip past, some I briefly chuckle at, and others I take a vested interest in for one reason or another.
I think it is fair to say that the majority of iPhone users involved in the jailbreak community have been keeping their gazes firmly fixed on the Twitter and BlogSpot accounts of developer Pod2g in the last couple of months. In November of 2011, he tweeted, somewhat out of the blue, that he had managed to find a bug in iOS 5 which he believed could ultimately lead to a distributable jailbreak. Less than two months later he remained true to his initial discovery and in partnership with the Chronic Dev and iPhone Dev Teams released a jailbreak capable of untethered iOS 5.0.1 on older A4 devices.
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.
When any new jailbreak is released, the majority of the social interest seems to be about the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users. The portable Apple TV device doesn’t seem to command a large slice of the attention, but it is worth noting that the device does run its own version of iOS and as a result can be jailbroken untethered, all thanks to pod2g’s exploit.
