Some (possibly) bad news about the 5.1 jailbreak untethered today comes to us from the guy who is actually working on the jailbreak. Namely, the iOS security researcher (ahem, iOS hacker) @Pod2G. In response to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter fans bugging him about an ETA for iOS 5.1, he said:
He then went on to add:
If you’ve been around the jailbreaking scene for any length of time, you know that the length of time that it can take to get a jailbreak ready for public use can vary wildly, and that the time has been increasing over the past few iOS releases. Apple has to legally put up with jailbreaking, meaning that they have no legal recourse and cannot sue or prosecute those who either jailbreak their iDevices or those who come up with jailbreaks, such as Pod2G and the iPhone Dev Team. However, they don’t have to make it easy to jailbreak. And that’s precisely what they’ve been doing – making jailbreaks more difficult.
Ever since the first iOS was jailbroken back in 2007, Apple has been engaged in a cat and mouse game with jailbreakers. Every time an iOS comes out, jailbreakers find “holes’ in it, or “exploits” as they’re known in jailbreaking circles. And then, of course, the next iOS that comes out, Apple specifically plugs those holes that allowed the jailbreaking. Apple even called out the iPhone Dev team by name in the release notes for iOS 5. So jailbreaking is only getting more and more difficult as time goes on. This is what Pod2G is getting at with his recent tweets.
iOS 5.1 is taking a record long time to hack. The tethered jailbreak came out almost immediately, as it relied on an exploit which had not been closed. This led many to erroneously believe that the untethered jailbreak would be right around the corner. However, it’s been over a month now since the release of iOS 5.1, and it seems that no jailbreak is in sight. Pod2G, Chpwn, and other jailbreakers continue to tell everyone not to get their hopes too high for a fast jailbreak, but with so many people upgrading to a new iOS before it has a jailbreak available for it, and with so many people now reliant on having a jailbreak to run their favorite 3rd party apps, it’s understandable that for many people, it’s difficult to have patience.
Pod2G has been getting a bit fed up, it seems, with everyone and their brother prodding him as though he owes them a jailbreak. If you look at his Twitter feed, you can see how he gets hundreds of @ tweets a day asking about an ETA and trying to hurry him along. Patience grasshoppah! His tweet today explained how much work still has to be done, and asks everyone to understand that this is a hobby for him, which he is not getting paid for.
Now, some could look at today’s tweet and think that the sky is falling and that we’ll never have a jailbreak untethered for iOS 5.1. However, we here at jailbreakuntethered.net see it a little differently. What @Pod2G is trying to do here is to manage expectations. He says that they’ll be working hard on the jailbreak this coming week and trying to pull all of the pieces together. Maybe everything will go fine, and we’ll have a jailbreak inside of the next couple of weeks. But, as he indicates, maybe he and the rest of the jailbreak team will run into trouble. And if that’s the case, it could be a month or 2 before they’re able to piece everything together and hack the new iOS into an untethered jailbreak version. We shouldn’t look at it like he’s saying it’ll definitely be a couple of months. How we need to see it is just that he needs some breathing room to get this stuff done. So lay off of him, and stay off his back. He’s working hard on a jailbreak untethered and it’ll be out in due time.
The thing that’s perhaps the most concerning is that if it does indeed take a couple of months for the untethered jailbreak on 5.1 to come out, that puts us very close to when iOS 6 is expected to be released, in June. So if it does end up being a month or more before the 5.1 jailbreak is released, be sure not to update to iOS 6 when it’s released, as you will once again lose the jailbreak that you’ve waited so long for!
