I think it is fair to say that the majority of iPhone users involved in the jailbreak community have been keeping their gazes firmly fixed on the Twitter and BlogSpot accounts of developer Pod2g in the last couple of months. In November of 2011, he tweeted, somewhat out of the blue, that he had managed to find a bug in iOS 5 which he believed could ultimately lead to a distributable jailbreak. Less than two months later he remained true to his initial discovery and in partnership with the Chronic Dev and iPhone Dev Teams released a jailbreak capable of untethered iOS 5.0.1 on older A4 devices.
But what about the iPhone 4S and iPad 2 which are the current generation devices and come equipped with Apples dual-core A5 chip? Unfortunately, at the time of releasing the Corona (anagram of racoon) jailbreak, the research and development process had not allowed the teams involved to include the A5 units on the list of supported devices. Pod2g had also tweeted out two days ago that he felt the need to disable to ability for readers to post comments on his blog posts and that he was sorry for the genuine comments which would be affected by this. If history is anything to go by, I can only assume that he was first of all receiving far too many comments to be able to get through himself with detracting from his work, and that a lot of the comments were negative from users who believe they have a God given right to a jailbreak.
With what I imagine is a retort to some of the negative comments he has received, Pod2g has today posted a new blog entry answering a few frequently asked questions in the hope of clearing up some of the confusion. Not one of his longer, more insightful posts but it does give clarity to a number of questions which have been on the minds of A5 device owners.
The first answer relates to the fact that Pod2g actually has his own iPhone 4S on an untethered jailbreak, so how come it hasn’t been released when it is technically possible to achieve? This is all down to the legalities involved in distributing a jailbreak for public consumption. The exploit used by Pod2g to inject the untethering files requires the use of an Apple developer account and until they can find a distributable exploit which enables them to set the Corona files into the correct position it remains an impossibility to release.
The next two questions are very similar to one another and focus of the fact that the A4 jailbreak was easier to release because a tethered jailbreak was already available, which sets a good foundation for the Corona files to be installed. Unfortunately to release a tethered A5 jailbreak would also require a distributable exploit which they do not have yet.
Finally, the last piece of the blog entry, which I have to admit saddens me a little – pod2g, release this stuff quick, [your insult here], I’ve waited enough now. Unfortunately this attitude towards developers and the teams who provide jailbreaks is far too common. I think it is fair to share that the average jailbreak user (myself included) is unaware of the huge technical process that goes into providing a jailbreak from start to finish. Another thing we need to bare in mind is that most of the time these guys are providing these tools free of charge and rely on donations – albeit sometimes very generous donations.
So what was his answer to the final question? If he could, he would of course. Work will continue on finding the requires exploits and hopefully we will see an A5 liberation soon.
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