Good news, iPhone jailbreakers! Less than 24 hours after iOS5 was announced at WWDC, Apple’s developer conference taking place in San Francisco this week, a member of the iPhone hacking collective known as the Dev-Team confirmed that the new operating system (OS) has been jailbroken.
The hackers already have their hands on the developer beta of the OS, which launched yesterday. It appears that this version of iOS is still susceptible to one of the existing exploits they use to provide jailbreaking tools to end users.
According to a tweet from the Dev-Team’s @MuscleNerd, he was able to jailbreak iOS5 running on an iPod Touch 4G using the limera1n jailbreaking method. Unfortunately, this jailbreak is tethered, which means you have to have your iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad connected (or “tethered”) to your computer whenever you reboot your device, in order to maintain the jailbreak. Most jailbreakers will likely wait for an untethered option to become available before proceeding to upgrade to the new OS.
As proof of the jailbreak, @MuscleNerd posted the following screenshots of a jailbroken iOS5, showing the Cydia (jailbreak app store) and iSSH icons on the iPod Touch’s homescreen. You can tell that this is iOS5 because other new icons are present, too, including “Newsstand,” the new home for your newspaper and magazines subscriptions on iOS5, and “Reminders,” a simple to-do list application.
However, it should be noted that just because the beta version is unpatched, things could change when the commercial release ships later this fall. By that point, this jailbreak may no longer work.
Will You Still Jailbreak?
In addition, while committed jailbreakers and unlockers (those who run their iPhones on unsupported cellular networks) will probably continue to hack their phones, many more casual jailbreakers may be happy enough with iOS5 to leave it as is this time.
After all, several of the most popular tweaks and enhancements are now core to the OS itself. One notable example is that of Mobile Notifier, an alternative notification system for iOS devices. In fact, the application’s creator, Peter Hajas, was hired by Apple only days before the reveal of iOS5. The similarities between the jailbreak version and Apple’s striking. For now, Hajas only has “intern” status at Apple, but his hire may serve as inspiration for future hackers looking to move from the jailbreaking world to the Apple design team itself.
Hmm, maybe that’s why Apple isn’t patching the exploit?
