iOS 8.3 Jailbreak Could Be Facing Delays

iOS 8.3 was released yesterday, but an iOS 8.3 jailbreak may not arrive for some time, as Apple did a fairly good job at patching up a handful of security exploits.

Jailbreak developer MuscleNerd tweeted that Apple’s 39 security bugs that were fixed in iOS 8.3 rivals the update from iOS 7.x to iOS 8 last year, making it one of the biggest updates as far as security fixes are concerned. Some of those fixes were exploits that were used by the TaiG jailbreak team, so this is certainly a big blow for the jailbreaking community.

Of course, iOS 8 was jailbroken fairly quickly, but that’s mostly because there was a jailbreak already available for iOS 8 before it was even released. iOS 8.3 is a much different story, as there’s currently no jailbreak in sight.

Whereas an iOS 8.2 jailbreak was right around the corner, an iOS 8.3 jailbreak may take a lot longer to hit the airwaves because of the new security fixes.

iOS 8.3 includes a handful of new features for users, including more emoji that are racially diverse and support for using CarPlay wirelessly, as well as the usual bug fixes and performance improvements to make the iOS experience better overall.

The TaiG dev team, which is responsible for the latest jailbreak version, has not posted anything new on their website to reflect iOS 8.3. Currently, the latest developments from the team include details on an iOS 8.2 jailbreak. According to a message that the TaiG dev team has posted (translated to English), the development of an iOS 8.2 jailbreak tool is “constrained by many factors.” However, the team hopes to release its iOS 8.2 jailbreak “it as soon as we can.”

Of course, TaiG’s message doesn’t give us a whole lot of information to work with and it doesn’t exactly give us a timeline as far as when to expect an iOS 8.2 jailbreak, but it at least proves that the TaiG team was working on an iOS 8.2 jailbreak.

Many users were hoping that an iOS 8.2 jailbreak would release last week in conjunction with the 2015 Mobile Security Summit, where the who’s who of the jailbreak community came and talked about their ideas on mobile security and jailbreaking. There were some big names, including P0sixninja, Comex, a member of the Evad3rs dev team, and a couple of members of the TaiG jailbreak team.

If you remember, iOS 8.1.3 officially patched up the TaiG iOS 8 jailbreak and that has carried over to iOS 8.2, as well as iOS 8.3. A support page on Apple’s website lists the TaiG Jailbreak Team as the source for a security vulnerability that Apple patched up in iOS 8.1.3, which means that iOS 8.1.3 is unjailbreakable, and as an extension, iOS 8.2 and iOS 8.3 are unjailbreakable as well.

In any case, we’re still optimistic that the smart minds of the jailbreaking community will bring their heads together and find a way past the Apple walls, but in the mean time, it might be a good idea to prepare your iPhone or iPad for the jailbreak by backing up your device through iTunes, downloading the iOS 8.3 update (but not installing it, of course), and back up your jailbreak tweaks using PkgBackup, which is available through Cydia.

Whatever you do, you don’t want to update over-the-air. Instead, plug your device into your computer and do it through iTunes. The reason for this is because past jailbreaks haven’t worked all too well when installing on a device that was updated over-the-air. Because of this, it’s best to update through iTunes and you’ll likely come out of it without any problems.

In the end, when an iOS 8.3 jailbreak does release, be sure to set aside at least an hour to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad. M0st of that time will be dedicated to downloading iOS 8.3 alone, while the actual jailbreaking process shouldn’t take too long — maybe 10 minutes tops, depending on the method used by the dev team.