Current situation of the jailbreak for iOS 8 [April 2015]

There are many users who ask us about the current situation of the jailbreak for iOS 8.2 and iOS 8.3. For this reason I write this post as summary to clear up some present and future doubts about the jailbreak.

There are various hackers / teams that are related to jailbreak. Some of them are far from the "scene" and are not expected to do anything in the short term, but they do there are 4 teams that are working to be able to give us the possibility to remove the limitations to our iPhone. I will start by talking about these 4 teams.

evad3rs

The evad3rs team is made up of 4 hackers: pimskek, planetbeing, pod2g y musclenerd. The 4 members joined in early 2013 and together they have released evasi0n and evasi0n7, jailbreaks for iOS 6 and iOS 7 respectively. Additionally, pod2g was responsible for other jailbreaks such as those in iOS 5.

TaiG and Pangu

The most recent jailbreaks have come to us from China. Initially, TaiG intended to attach a Chinese app store to the evasi0n7 jailbreak by partnering with evad3rs, but the store was withdrawn in new versions because, according to evad3rs and Saurik, they incited piracy. TaiG are responsible for the latest jailbreak released for a public iOS version, which is iOS 8.1.2. The other Chinese hacking team is Pangu, which released the jailbreak for iOS 8.0-8.1.

i0n1c

The German is a great hacker, but he is not exactly famous for his sympathy. i0n1c wants, as you can understand, to make money by providing what he considers a service that many users take advantage of. This is why it has not released any public jailbreak since iOS 4, but it has tends to show that you have a jailbreak available long before other hackers. It is said that, somehow, trained Pangu Team to develop the iOS 8 jailbreak.

Inactive hackers

There are other hackers, but they are not active at the moment. One of them is winocm, but he was signed by Apple and, logically, he will not launch any jailbreak for the duration of his contract with the Cupertino company. The latest iOS 6 jailbreaks are yours. Another hacker who is standing still regarding iOS is comex, who was responsible for the simplest jailbreak to perform for users to date, a jailbreak that was made from the iPhone Safari: JailbreakMe. And it remains for me to name another great hacker, GeoHot, who was also the responsible for the jailbreak for PS3 and that his last contribution to the scene was to review the first jailbreak related to the Chinese to check its security.

With all this explained, we are going to comment on the current jailbreak status.

Something important to explain is that for an iOS version to be installed, the device has to get a digital signature that accompanies the installation. When we are going to install any version, the iPhone consults with Apple's servers and downloads the new version of iOS with a software signature. Without this signature, we will not be able to install a new version of iOS.

The latest public jailbreak available is iOS 8.1.2

• If we have iOS 8.1.2 installed, we can jailbreak our iPhone with TaiG jailbreak. But only if we have that version installed.
• If we have an older version, we will not be able to upload to iOS 8.1.2 because said version is no longer signed, having as only possibility to install iOS 8.3 which is the most up-to-date public version and, therefore, the only one signed at this time.
• If we have a higher version, we will not be able to downgrade to iOS 8.1.2 because Apple doesn't allow it. Downgrade capable devices (such as iPhone 4) cannot install iOS 8.

No jailbreak nor expected for iOS 8.2-8.3

• If you have iOS 8.2 installed, I'm either very wrong or you do not have to wait for the release of a jailbreak for your version. A jailbreak for beta 2 of that version and it was launched because Apple had already plugged the holes used in previous versions. In other words, they released a jailbreak for the beta 2 of iOS 8.2 because neither the jailbreak nor its exploits would be used for any future version.
• My recommendation, and it is something that I have done myself, is that If you have iOS 8.2 installed, install iOS 8.3. At least you will have the most up-to-date system.
• We know that these versions are vulnerable because i0n1c has already made public the typical video that is made to demonstrate that a jailbreak has been achieved. He did it to the version 8.4 iOS Beta 1, but current versions have the same or more bugs than iOS 8.4.

Future of the jailbreak

The future is simply uncertain. The perfect operating system does not exist and, for this reason, there will always be new jailbreaks. The doubt is "when”. As a general rule, when we are on dates like the current ones, in which there is little more than a month left for the launch of a major iOS update, no jailbreak will come out. Hackers take into account where the jailbreak is currently in and what benefits a new jailbreak would bring at the time of launch. The idea is that iOS 8.1.2 is a stable enough version to "park" the jailbreak until future versions with important news. Between iOS 8.2 and iOS 8.4, the highlights are the Apple Watch app and the upcoming music app for iOS 8.4, something hackers will regard as peccata minuta compared to what will arrive in June (publicly released in September). They won't use hard-to-get exploits in versions with no really big changes.

Conclusion

If we take the previous years as a reference, we have to be patient if we want to jailbreak our iPhone. The jailbreak (although I can be wrong) It won't be released until Apple publicly releases iOS 9 and fixes the first bugs in iOS 9.0.1. Although what I am going to say may be exasperating, the normal thing is that, at the earliest, there will be no jailbreak until October being very optimistic, although it is also true that the arrival of the Chinese on the scene can make it appear much earlier. There is a long shot that Pangu or TaiG will release an iOS 8.4 jailbreak that is expected to be publicly released in late May or early June.