A few hours ago, iOS 4.3.5 was released publicly, to the surprise of many. The new update, the second of its kind in one month, is not expected to receive an untethered jailbreak anytime soon, therefore users should refrain from updating at this point in time.
The warning was issued by @MuscleNerd, a prominent member of the iPhone Dev Team, responsible for developing jailbreaking solutions such as Redsn0w. His tweet couldn’t be more clear:
Jailbreakers please stay away from today’s iOS 4.3.5 update!
iOS 4.3.5 came out earlier today to the surprise of many, including well-known members of the Apple community, who didn’t expect yet another update for iOS 4, given that its successor, iOS 5, is in fast development and on schedule to be officially released in early Fall. The update includes a fix for a security issue when validating certificates, as Apple explained on the software’s official release notes, although we know little about what changed at this point.
While no untethered jailbreak will be available, users can of course still perform a tethered jailbreak using Redsn0w, much like they’ve been able to with every version of iOS 4 before official untethered jailbreaks came out. Those who have applied this kind of jailbreaks should know, however, how unpractical they are, since they require the device to be plugged into a computer running Redsn0w or an equivalent tool every time it’s started up in order to boot into a jailbroken state. If you’re looking to perform this type of jailbreak, check out our write-up here. Keep in mind that this method doesn’t work on the iPad 2, as explained here.
There are several reasons why developers might not be looking into creating untethered jailbreaks for the remaining versions of iOS 4. For one, they’ll be replaced in just a few months, therefore the time and resources spent on developing a jailbreak for a soon-to-be-surpassed version of iOS might not have that much of a purpose. Moreover, the jailbreaking community might not want to expose more vulnerabilities in the iOS code so that they won’t be fixed in iOS 5, making it easily jailbreakable quickly after it’s released.
Given these facts, we urge all of those using iOS 4.3.3 or under not to upgrade if they’re looking to preserve their untethered jailbreaks. Subsequent releases have included nothing but small fixes that should have no impact on users that are careful on the web and use common sense while using the system. If you’re already using a newer version, it’s not too late to downgrade, as long as you’ve backed up your SHSH blob.
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