Should I Jailbreak iOS 8 & the iPhone 6?

It’s been a little over a month since iOS 8 initially released to the public, with the first major update releasing earlier this week in the form of iOS 8.1, and already an iOS 8 jailbreak has released, but don’t get your hopes up just yet.

If you’re wondering whether or not you should jailbreak your iPhone 6 or other iOS device running iOS 8, here’s the short version: Don’t do it.

It’s odd enough that we’re seeing an iOS 8 jailbreak so soon in the iOS 8 lifecycle, considering that iOS 7 didn’t have a jailbreak until December. However, this jailbreak comes from the same team that brought us the amazing iOS 7.1 jailbreak earlier this year.

Pangu has released an iOS 8 jailbreak that also works with the latest iOS 8.1 update that was released earlier this week, but it’s important to know what we’re dealing with for this initial jailbreak release.

For starters, one big reason why you shouldn’t jailbreak your iOS 8 device just yet is that this initial jailbreak release doesn’t have Cydia included.

Well, why not? It’s simply because Cydia isn’t ready for iOS 8 yet, but Saurik (the creator and active developer for Cydia) says that he’s working on making it compatible with iOS 8 as we speak. In the meantime, this jailbreak release can be considered a developer release that’s really only meant for jailbreak developers to update their tweaks to be compatible with OS 8.

Furthermore, there’s still a handful of compatibility issues, similar to ones that we saw when Pangu released the iOS 7.1 jailbreak. This iOS 8 jailbreak only works with Windows computers for now, with an OS X version coming sometime soon.

Plus, there’s no English version yet of the iOS 8 jailbreak install tool, so unless you know Chinese, you might have a hard time jailbreaking your iPhone 6 or other iOS 8 device.

You also need to have Find My iPhone and the passcode disabled for the tool to work, which is something that didn’t need to be done for the iOS 7.1 jailbreak.

In any case, today’s iOS 8 jailbreak release technically isn’t for general users, and is only really meant for developers to test out their tweaks. Plus, Cydia isn’t even available in this initial release yet, so you really have no incentive to jailbreak in the first place, at least not yet.

However, the good news is that this iOS 8 jailbreak will work with all devices that are capable of running iOS 8, including the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad mini 3, and iPad Air 2, as well as older devices like the iPhone 5s and iPad Air.

Ever since the initial announcement of iOS 8 last month, the jailbreak community was rather curious as to when an iOS 8 jailbreak would hit the public. Of course, we could’ve relied on past history as far as when to expect it, but even that’s a little shaky.

The Jailbreak community on Reddit is usually buzzing with jailbreak hype on a new version of iOS, but it has been extremely quiet until today, which is a little odd, but maybe not too surprising considering that nobody was getting their hopes up just yet.

Many of the big names in the jailbreak community have been skeptical about an iOS 8 jailbreak, but that’s mostly because many of these big names were not actively working on one in the first place. Even the Evad3rs dev team that was responsible for the initial iOS 7 jailbreak said that jailbreaking was getting “boring” for them. This isn’t too surprising to hear, as jailbreaking certainly isn’t as exciting as it was when the iPhone first came out in 2007, and coming out with a new jailbreak tool every year can be a bit exhausting to say the least.

Overall, it seems that many of the popular jailbreak developers that have been in the scene for a while are getting a bit tired. While many of them are still working on various tweaks for jailbroken devices, the actual jailbreak is something that not many developers are working on at the moment, leaving more room for unknown developers like the Pangu team to break into the jailbreak scene.