Paul Morris on January 20, 2012, 6:35 pm

Corona A5 Jailbreak For iPhone 4S & iPad 2 Nearly Ready For Public Use, Here’s Everything You Need To Know

We have waited nearly three months in total, and A5 owners have had to sit in envy for nearly four weeks as they watch their A4 device friends enjoy an untethered iOS 5.0.1 jailbreak, but the wait is nearly over. The release of the Corona A5 jailbreak is close and I can almost taste its liberating goodness.

Chronic Dev Team member, P0sixninja put out a typical teasing tweet announcing ‘not much longer now’ to the community, which had us wondering whether the release would possibly be this Sunday, or maybe even sooner. The tweet has since been followed up by legendary iPhone Dev Team member, MuscleNerd, with a link to the official blog post with quite an informative A5 Corona update.

He is right in what he says, the eyes of the community have been firmly fixed upon the development teams and although they produced the A4 jailbreak, it probably only attracted more attention towards them from iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners who felt a little aggrieved about their lack of device freedom. The combined efforts of French security researcher, Pod2g, and the individual members of both major development teams, the A5 version of the Corona jailbreak is tantalizingly close to a public release.

One of the most encouraging parts of the update, is the confirmation that all of the major technical hurdles have been overcome. You may remember that the production of the jailbreak led to caching issues, as well as finding a usable way to inject the untether files without the need for an official developer account, and also the Apple sandbox issues which were overcome by PlanetBeing and Cydia founder Saurik. The only real issue that they face now is packaging all of the jailbreak files into software which is as bug free as possible which I’m sure we would all agree is one of the most crucial parts.

So what can we expect in terms of release tools? Well, to achieve maximum flexibility, the teams have decided to offer multiple tools which should appease all:

The Chronic Dev Team have added all jailbreak files into a GUI package that is both PC and Mac compatible. They hope that this tool will prove enough for the majority of users.
The iPhone Dev team will produce a command line interface which will offer the sae functionality. The CLI will allow a user to perform the entire jailbreak if necessary, the ultimate hope is that this tool will help with individual debugging cases. With over 20 options, the CLI will be extremely flexible.
The inevitable update to Redsn0w will come when all bugs have been worked out, but the command line interface tool will still be available. Redsn0w will also use native Apple libraries, offering a different approach to that of the Chronic Dev Team, again affording maximum flexibility for users.

They have also provided information pertaining to the supported firmware versions of the A5 jailbreak:

iPhone4S: 5.0 (9A334), 5.0.1 (9A405) and the “other” 5.0.1 (9A406)
iPad2: 5.0.1 (9A405)

If you are an iPhone 4S owner who is ultimately looking to achieve a software based unlock, then the advise given is to remain on iOS 5.0 (9A334), with all other users updating to 5.0.1. If you are an iPhone 4S owner who has already updated to iOS 5.0.1, unfortunately it is too late to go back to 5.0, however, if you are on build number 9A406 it is possible to downgrade the baseband to that of 9A405 while the window remains open. Because the overall flow for this release has never been attempted before, MuscleNerd is warning of potential bugs or problems that cannot be predicted. The comments section on the official blog will be monitored and assistance provided when required.

It looks as though the ‘Dream Team’ combination has worked flawlessly, with the individual skill set of each member providing the key to a very prompt release. Because it was a combined effort, a group donation account has been set up for anyone who does wish to support their efforts. This will be fairly split amongst all members.

For those of you who are sporting A4 devices, you can follow our complete step by step guide posted here to jailbreak iOS 5.0.1 untethered on iPhone 4, 3GS, iPad 1, and iPod touch 3G/4G using Redsn0w or Sn0wbreeze.