There was a major Christmas surprise for the jailbreak community as a jailbreak for iOS 11 was released. The iOS jailbreak scene has more or less been stagnant since Apple launched a bug bounty system back in 2016, as hackers basically have two choices when they discover a iOS security flaw that could lead to a jailbreak: They can submit it to Apple and be rewarded up to $200,000… Or they can release it to the wild, get no money, and instead just deal with Reddit drama. Judging by the complete lack of jailbreaks we’ve seen in recent versions of iOS, this wasn’t a difficult decision. Well, Jonathan “Morpheus______" Levin was apparently feeling extra generous when he released an iOS 11 jailbreak into the wild early this morning:
Santa's early by 30 mins because it's been a long day.
Jailbreak movement #2: LiberIOS, to liberate (almost) all other *OS devices – 11.0 and 11.1.x ONLY.https://t.co/yNe7zujxl5
Again, please use official page – I might update.
And no, we're not done. But that's all tonight.
— Jonathan Levin (@Morpheus______) December 26, 2017
This particular jailbreak comes with a pretty significant catch: Right now, all it is is the jailbreak itself. You can SSH into your device and do all the other things that make installing Cydia and all the other jailbreak tweaks possible… But Cydia isn’t working yet, neither are the various substrates that Cydia requires. When will Cydia and everything else start working? Well, that is the question. Here’s a quote from Reddit explaining the situation:
[W]hy is Cydia not working with all these Jailbreaks huh? What’s the deal. Well. Cydia and specifically substrate rely on a KPP Bypass to function, of which we currently don’t have. So we are waiting on Lord Saurik to update Substrate to a position where a KPP bypass is not required. No one but Saurik can achieve this. No one else. So don’t go asking jailbreak developers why Cydia doesn’t work and when will it. Because they don’t know. Only Saurik knows. Pestering developers only drags them down and it really isn’t helpful.
Apparently many of the low-level frameworks that make Cydia and the rest of the jailbreak ecosystem work are all 32 bit, and were never updated to the 64 bit binaries that iOS 11 requires. There wasn’t much hope for an iOS 11 jailbreak, and the scene more or less died off. Part of me wonders if this isn’t just an elaborate way to troll Jay “Saurik" Freeman, as it has felt like he’s really moved on from Cydia. Releasing a jailbreak and being like, “Welp it’s up to Saurik" to do the rest is a pretty good way to have a fire hose of internet weirdos pestering you 24/7.
Anyway, you can download the iOS 11 jailbreak in its current for here– Just keep in mind that unless you’re an actual jailbreak developer you can’t do much of anything with it just yet.
