iOS 8 Jailbreak Release Making Progress

It’s been a bit over a month since iOS 8 initially released to the public, with the first major update releasing earlier this month in the form of iOS 8.1, and already an iOS 8 jailbreak has released somewhat. While you shouldn’t get your hopes up just yet, the progress on a less-buggy jailbreak release is slowly moving along.

Pangu released the iOS 8 jailbreak earlier this month and it’s the same dev team who was responsible for the iOS 7.1 jailbreak earlier this year, and it essentially came out of nowhere. Now they’re back with an iOS 8-iOS 8.1 jailbreak, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

For starters, this jailbreak doesn’t have Cydia included yet, simply because it’s not fully ready for iOS 8, but Saurik (the active developer for Cydia) says that he’s working on it 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.

However, Saurik has updated Cydia for iOS 8, but it still needs to be included with the iOS 8 jailbreak. Otherwise, jailbreakers have to install Cydia separately through SSH, which isn’t something that many users would know how to do, especially since jailbreak installations have gotten easier and easier over the years.

Furthermore, the jailbreak is only compatible on Windows, with an OS X version coming later, which was the same when Pangu released the iOS 7.1 jailbreak earlier this year. And it seems there’s no English version yet, but we should see these things eventually.

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.

You also need to have Find My iPhone and the passcode disabled for the jailbreak 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.

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.

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.