A5 Jailbreak ‘Nearly Ready To Pop’ As More Details Are Released

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Having been promised just over a week ago that an untethered jailbreak for Apple’s A5 powered devices was “just a matter of days away,” we were all expecting to see Cydia and all sorts of fancy tweaks installed on our devices by now. But of course, these things take time. After all, we want a smooth and reliable experience when we come to jailbreak our most prized possessions.

While the exploit still isn’t quite ready for public release, it’s certainly very close. Pod2g has issued further details on his team’s work, revealing that all the “technical hurdles” have already been overcome, and that they are just ironing out the final bug fixes before the hack goes live.

In a post on his blog, Pod2g promises once more that the software is “nearly ready for general release,” and provides more details on the exploit:

Due to the combined efforts of @pod2g and members of the iPhone Dev Team and Chronic Dev Team, we’re nearly ready for a general release! All technical hurdles dealing with the underlying technique have been overcome, and its now all about making the jailbreak as bug free as possible…

Jailbreak programs:

To be as flexible as possible, the A5 version of the corona jailbreak will take multiple forms:

  • Chronic Dev have incorporated the overall flow into a GUI that runs on your Mac or PC. The goal is for the GUI to be enough for most cases.
  • iPhone Dev have incorporated the exact same flow into a command-line interface (CLI). This will allow us to help users through individual steps of the jailbreak manually, to both help the user and help improve the overall flow. Although the CLI will also allow the user to perform the entire jailbreak from beginning to end, we anticipate it will be more useful in debugging the occasional errors. The CLI currently has over 20 individual options (in addition to the single “jailbreak” option) that should be useful during debug after the GUI release.
  • Once all the bugs in the flow are worked out, we’ll also incorporate it into the redsn0w GUI (but still leave the CLI freely available too). In order to maximize the chances of the jailbreak working for everyone, the redsn0w GUI will use native Apple iTunes libraries — this technique is slightly different than how the Chronic Dev GUI handles communications, and should provide nice combined coverage for all the odd computer configurations out there.

Firmware:

The supported firmware versions will be:

  • iPhone 4S: 5.0 (9A334), 5.0.1 (9A405) and the “other” 5.0.1 (9A406)
  • iPad 2: 5.0.1 (9A405)

iPhone 4S owners looking to maximize their chances of achieving an eventual software-based carrier unlock should be staying at 5.0. Everyone else should be at 5.0.1. If you’re an iPhone 4S owner who already updated to 5.0.1, it’s too late to go back down to 5.0. But if you’re on 9A406 it is possible to downgrade the BB by going to the 9A405 version of 5.0.1 while the window is still open.

Towards the end of his post, Pod2g warns that this particular style of jailbreak is new, and that you are strongly advised to backup your devices before attempting to jailbreak.

Of course, we will be sure to let you know as soon as the jailbreak goes live.

[via iDownloadBlog]

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