The good news is that someone managed to create an iOS 11.3 jailbreak. The bad news is that the person who managed the trick probably won’t turn it into anything the general public can use.
While this once would have left a significant percentage of the iPhone community tearing its hair out, these days jailbreaking is almost dead.
A Chinese hacker named Qixun Zhao, who also goes by the Twitter handle SorryMybad, claims to have cracked Apple’s software. His post says it all: “Jailbreak on the latest iOS 11.3”. He posted several screenshots to support his claim.
But those same images, and the rest of his post, show that the goal of this project was to score $30,000 from the Microsoft Bug Bounty program. Zhao belongs to the Qihoo 360 Vulcan Team, which looks for bugs but doesn’t publicly expose the details of them.
So far, Zhao≥ has said nothing about using his discoveries to make a publicly-available iOS 11.3 jailbreak.
Jailbreaking mostly a thing of the past
In the early days of the iPhone, Apple’s operating system was fairly simple. While easy to use, it lacked many features people wanted. The solution was jailbreaking: hackers finding ways to modify the operating system so non-authorized software could be installed.
But these days, so many features have been added to iOS that there’s little need for jailbreaking. Interest dwindled to the point that two of the three top repositories for jailbroken apps shut down last year.
Which is just as well, because Apple has made it much harder. It took about 6 months to jailbreak iOS 11, for example.
So if Zhao doesn’t release his iOS 11.3 jailbreak, a few people will be frustrated. But not many.
