Downgrading iOS to previous versions might be a possibility again very soon

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TinyUmbrella is back. Photo: Adam/Flickr CC

Back in the good old days of jailbreaking, your first step before upgrading to the latest version of iOS was to plug your device into an app called TinyUmbrella and save your SHSH blobs.

What are blobs? Simply put, saving your blobs gave jailbreakers the possibility of downgrading their devices to a previous version of iOS. Unfortunately, with iOS 5, Apple caught up with the way jailbreakers were using blobs, making TinyUmbrella virtually useless.

Now that’s changed. Three years later, it finally appears that the blobby wind is blowing in the opposite direction, and a new TinyUmbrella beta has been released that once more allows jailbreakers to save their SHSH blobs.

The new beta of TinyUmbrella requires Java, and features a stripped-down, one-button interface that allows users to plug in their devices and slurp up all their blobs with a single click.

Why has TinyUmbrella been updated after all this time? It’s not entirely clear, but it appears something has changed in iOS 8.2 or iOS 8.3 to make blobs relevant again to anybody downgrading iOS.

Jeff Benjamin over at the iDownloadBlog asked TinyUmbrella developer Semaphore about the new version of the app on Twitter:

This is good news. Theoretically, it means if you upgrade to iOS 9, and don’t like the hit against your device’s performance, you could downgrade back to iOS 8 as long as you saved your blobs first.

Time will tell if it’s actually that simple, but there’s reason to be hopeful.

Source: TinyUmbrella

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