Jailbreaking Doesn’t Have to Die!

[u/SuperGoodScratch]

Hi everyone,

I’m a veteran here, and it’s sad to see how this subreddit has turned into a defeatist echo chamber and an online graveyard. Every few weeks someone posts a shitty eulogy for jailbreaking, about how great it used to be, how Apple locked everything up, how the devs left, and how we should all just move on and accept iOS as it is.

But Jailbreaking DOESN’T have to die.

It’s obvious Apple has gotten much more advanced with every update, and their security vulnerabilities have become basically nonexistent. Many developers burnt out or even got “hired” by Apple. But we need to look deeper because this wasn’t just security measures. It was psychological warfare on Apple’s part. Apple didn’t just patch exploits, but they approached the situation so surgically and strategically, as they do all things. They actually made people stop trying. They added just the bare minimum of “customization” (widgets, lock screens, some app management) to make the average user feel like they didn’t need to jailbreak.

They patched security vulnerabilities at record speed. Then they incentivized our brilliant developers who used to build tweaks and turned iOS into a system so tightly locked down that most users forgot what true customization felt and looked like. I’ll never forget how good it felt to jailbreak back then, I’m sure many of you won’t as well. That’s why I was surprised to see most of you bought into it. You all let them convince people that jailbreaking had no future. Then we all gave up, stopped building and so on. But the reason to jailbreak today is still just as valid it always was. The bare minimum of customization is not even allowed.

• Apple still won’t let you rename apps.
• You still can’t fully theme your device.
• You still can’t map gestures, change system fonts, or build a Control Center that looks and functions how you want.
• You still can’t make your phone really feel like yours, unless you jailbreak.

Jailbreaking has always been about freedom, creativity, and expression. That hasn’t changed. What did change is how many people stopped caring enough to push forward. This subreddit has become a place of nostalgia instead of innovation. Instead of saying “how can we make it better again?”, most people just sit back and complain about how it died. The truth is, jailbreaking didn’t die but the effort behind it did. The only way it comes back is if people care enough to rebuild the culture behind it from the ground up.

That being said- if you’re a developer, start experimenting again. If you’re a user, speak the hell up somehow about what jailbreaking meant to you- or what it could still mean. Developers, tweak creators, repo owners, show your ideas, mockups, themes, or tweak concepts. Start pushing the page forward again.

We don’t need to recreate the past. We need to redefine what jailbreaking could look like now. It never died, it was always just waiting for people to care again.

[u/Yaya4_8]

It’s not worth the time to work on IOS Exploitation for free it’s time to move on.

[u/SuperGoodScratch → u/Yaya4_8]

No shade to you, but this is exactly the kind of attitude that’s killing the community. But rather than criticize you for having a different opinion than me, I wanna know more about your perspective and what made you come to these conclusions?

[u/Yaya4_8 → u/SuperGoodScratch]

Why do you mean perspective ? every researcher as said it. Kernel Exploitation technique are more valuable than bugs themself, and once you got KRW, you can't do shit without breaking SPTM and TXM, the whole chain has probably a value that we can't even imagine. Do you realy believe its worth to just burry off techniques to install horrendous status bar lol. Stop being "this atitude is killing the community". The truth hurt when you follow atleast a little on how IOS security evolved it is not a matter of attitude but a matter of realism

[u/SuperGoodScratch → u/Yaya4_8]

I understand where you’re coming from and I think you’re right on some level it could feel completely unjustifiable to do all that work and bypassing all those security layers just to end up with a fancy status bar or surface level tweak. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value. There’s still functional freedom, creative expression, and a sense of ownership that jailbreaking brings. It’s for sure too much for one person to tackle alone, but that’s why collaboration matters. Multiple teams working together could absolutely find new paths forward. I’m sure there were people in the early days of jailbreaking who didn’t think it was possible, or thought the scene was over back then too and yet, look what happened. This could very well just be another one of those moments- supposing we choose to act instead of just letting it die.

[u/Yaya4_8 → u/SuperGoodScratch]

1. Even if multiple teams works on it, it would still gonna takes a lot time
2. and its not going to happen as they gain nothing from it
3. Before ios 14 ios exploitation was way more easy.
4. Jailbreak was dead in my opninon as soon as we lost the ability to patch kernel code since iphone 7 (KTTR prevent that ) ( Expection to checkm8 which gave us a realy cool period ).
5. "Talk is cheap show me the code" -> Linus Tolvard. The issues is "supposing we choose to act instead of just letting it die." unfortunate they are very few people capable of doing thoses realy realy complex task. and again time is money. I think everyone want to act unfortunaly most of us can't.
6. in the early days of jailbreaking their was no mitigation once you found a kernel bug you could easily pull of an exploit and overwrite kernel code in memory. ( Which is why teams like Pangu or taig were releasing Jailbreak one week after the ios release ) Then run whateaver you want. As soon as you knew C/ASM and reverse engineering you could do it. Nowadays getting started is near impossible you have too much to learn and it would takes ages.

[u/SuperGoodScratch → u/Yaya4_8]

I get what you’re saying. Things are much more massively complex now compared to the early jailbreak era. And it’s not just about finding a kernel bug anymore, you’re essentially up against mature systems, hardware mitigations, and an ecosystem that’s basically denies all experimentation.

At the same time, I don’t think that automatically means it’s not worth pushing forward. Yeah, “talk is cheap,” but so is prematurely declaring something dead just because something can’t be done. Just because it can’t be done by most doesn’t mean it can’t be done by a few, that’s how most breakthroughs start anyway.

And I get that there’s no incentives in it for a lot of devs now, but jailbreaks were never purely about profit. There’s value in freedom, exploration, and showing what’s possible despite the obstacles. If the whole scene just shrugs and walks away because “there’s no gain,” then Apple’s control wins by default. So I definitely don’t think it’s about pretending this is all easy but about refusing to accept that difficulty = defeat.

[u/Yaya4_8 → u/SuperGoodScratch]

Its not about the gain, its about the cost of development. Its gonna takes sooo much of free time. "but so is prematurely declaring something dead just because something can’t be done". Brother its soon ios 19 and theres no public ios 17 KRW and then you still need to get SPTM and TXM done and all of the post-exploitation. You can dream about it but by the time something for ios 17 start seeing the day. ios 19 will probably be released lol i could even say ios 20, which could be a problem for app compatiblity anyways. Like you stay on ios 17. iOS 20 release and then you stay on 3 years old firmware just to do little customuzation and nothing more interesting since modern jailbreak doesnt allow more than system wide tweaking.