iOS Jailbreak Latest News & Update: The Reason Why Cydia Store is Closing; Jailbreak Method on the Horizon?

The iOS jailbreak community recently received unfortunate news as the Cydia Store is now shutting down for good. The announcement was made by Cydia creator Jay “Saurik” Freeman himself on Reddit, detailing the reason for his decision.

To summarize, Saurik decided to walk away from this iOS jailbreak project as it was mentally and financially detrimental to his life. The creator added that he was planning to shut down the app for a while now given that it wasn’t yielding him any profit.

This is quite the disheartening announcement for people who had their phone undergo an iOS jailbreak process, with the overall ecosystem of this community on a steady decline for years. As Apple employs stricter security features on its devices, it’s been increasingly difficult to jailbreak its operating system, thus reducing the number of those who are using a jailbroken Apple product.

And with the Cydia Store closing, devices that underwent an iOS jailbreak procedure will have a difficult time purchasing items and would have to find other options that offer such services. As for the jailbreak process itself, developers and researchers haven’t yet released a public code despite the various efforts by multiple parties.

However, there’s been reports claiming that an iOS jailbreak process has already been done by a Tencent Keenlab researcher who bypassed the iOS 12.1. Liang Chen, the developer in question, said that he used his method on the iPhone XS Max and manage to weaved his way through the security features of the device.

The problem is that Chen is opting to keep the iOS jailbreak method for himself or is may be planning to sell it to interested third parties. Most researchers are opting for his kind of approach in order for their effort to be compensated.

But there’s still hope for those who are waiting for a public iOS jailbreak procedure. A researcher named Kudima released a method that uses a WebKit RCE to exploit the cracks present in the GitHub repository. However, the process is far from perfect and only provides a partial pathway to a full jailbreak gateway. Users will have to be patient for other researchers to make significant progress on this regard as it’s notoriously difficult to break through Apple’s latest operating system.