Warning: iPhone 4S and iPad 2 jailbreak still not possible!

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 06 January 2012 12:54

Opinion and Analysis

Warning: all those sites promising a jailbreak for the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 are lying to you, as it's not possible yet, but if hacker 'pod2g' is successful, a jailbreak for devices running the A5 processor (which is the iPhone 4S and iPad 2) might be coming in the next week or two.

Whether you've been following the news over being able to jailbreak an iPhone 4S or iPad 2, or not, there's one thing you need to know: as of today, January 6 2012, it's still not possible.

UPDATE: 21 JAN 2012 - OFFICIAL IPHONE 4S AND IPAD 2 JAILBREAK NOW AVAILABLE, CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS.

That's despite a myriad of scam sites promising that such a tethered or untethered jailbreak is possible, even though all they're doing is charging you somewhere between US $20 and US $30 for an unlock that is available free of charge from the iPhone Dev Team and following the instructions at places like iClarified.

What these sites will do is offer a packaged up version of the free jailbreaking software available, and while they will do the job of unlock A4-powered devices such as the iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad 1, iPod Touch 3 and 4 on iOS 5.0.1, they simply won't work on the iPhone 4S or the iPad 2 as yet - despite people having seen screenshots of both the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 being jailbroken by the hackers.

Sadly for the rest of us, they're able to jailbreak due to being registered Apple developers, which gives them some additional access to underlying systems than non-developers, and if the hackers were to release a working jailbreak with what they know now, they'd be illegally using some of Apple's code to do so, and they don't want to do that.

So, work continues on finding a way to jailbreak the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 without needing to use anyone else's licensed code, with the iPhone Dev Team and hacker 'pod2g' getting the work done.

Indeed, pod2g asks at his blog entry on an 'A5 FAQ' in a pseudo Q&A session:

Q. How could pod2g have an untethered 4S and dev teams still haven't released tools to achieve this at home?

A. 'The exploit I used to inject the untethering files to the 4S relies on having a developer account, and can't be released publicly.

'It's the same reason why @MuscleNerd has an iPad 2 tethered jailbreak but couldn't distribute it.

'So, we need to find a distributable exploit to remount the system partition read/write and to set Corona files at the correct places.'

Continued on page two, please read on!