How to Update to iOS 8.3 on a Jailbroken iPhone

Choosing between keeping your jailbreak or updating to iOS 8.3 can be a tough decision, but if you’re set on updating, here’s how to update to iOS 8.3 on a jailbroken iPhone.

Updating your non-jailbroken iPhone is really easy, but on a jailbroken iPhone, you have to do things a bit differently. Even if you’ll be losing your jailbreak, you simply just can’t hit update and instantly be running iOS 8.3.

The latest version of iOS that’s jailbreakable is iOS 8.1.2, which is already outdated by iOS 8.1.3, iOS 8.2, and now iOS 8.3. Since then, many performance improvements, bug fixes and new features have been added to iOS 8, which may tempt some jailbreakers to jump ship and update to the latest version of iOS, knowing that they will lose their jailbreak.

However, one question you should ask yourself is if it’s really worth upgrading to iOS 8.3 if it means that you’ll lose your jailbreak. iOS 8.3 comes with some new emoji, wireless CarPlay support and a wealth of security fixes and performance improvements. Some users will enjoy these new changes and improvements can be nothing but good, but the enjoyment of a jailbroken iPhone can sometimes outweigh the new features in a new iOS update.

If this is a question that you’ve been asking yourself lately, you’re not alone Of course, it’s a question that you’ll ultimately have to answer yourself based on how much you use your installed jailbreak tweaks and how much you’d get out of the new features in iOS 8.3, but if you’re set on updating your iPhone to iOS 8.3 and losing your jailbreak, here’s how to do it.

How to Unjailbreak Your iPhone & Update to iOS 8.3

Thankfully, while the process to update an iPhone that’s jailbroken is a bit different than the traditional way, it’s still pretty easy and painless, but it takes just a bit more time, so patience is something that you may want for this.

First off, plug your iPhone into your computer and open up iTunes. Then click on the iPhone icon toward the upper-left corner of the window.

From there, click on Back Up Now to back up your iPhone completely before you update. You’re simply backing up your apps and settings so that you’ll get them back after you lose your jailbreak and update to iOS 8.3, since it will completely restore your iPhone.

You may get a pop-up that asks if you want to back up any apps that are on your iPhone but not in your iTunes library. You can choose to back up these apps or not.

After the backup process is complete, click on Restore iPhone. You’ll need to disable Find My iPhone in order to do this, so just simply open up the Settings app on your iPhone and tap on iCloud. From there, toggle off Find My iPhone and enter in your Apple ID password to confirm.

After you click on Restore iPhone, you’ll be taken through the process of updating your iPhone to the latest version of iOS. It will take a bit of time to download the update and install it, so this is where you can lean back and wait for the update to download.

After the update is complete, you’ll be asked if you want to set up your iPhone as a new iPhone or restore from a backup. Since you backed up all of your stuff before you began, you’ll want to restore from the backup.

After your iPhone successfully restores from the backup, you’ll be left with the same iPhone that you started with, only this time it will be unjailbroken and updated to iOS 8.3. Cydia will be gone from your home screen and all of your jailbreak tweaks will be gone as well.

However, you’ll have a new app to play around with. iOS 8.3 comes with the Apple Watch app, which allows you to pair your Apple Watch to your iPhone. This app isn’t available in older versions of iOS, including iOS 8.1.2, which is the latest version that can be jailbroken.