Ever since December, the iOS jailbreak scene has been fire with developers trying to turn Ian Beer’s exploit into something useful. Finally, after 2 and a half months of hard work, a full jailbreak is quite close to being here! This article is here to keep you informed about what’s happening in the iOS jailbreak scene if you don’t check r/jailbreak all the time.

Cydia working on Electra and Meridian

As Ian Beer’s exploit was an exploit to get around rather than fully bypass KPP, hence the term KPPLess (as opposed to KPP bypass), previous jailbreak infrastructure could no longer be used without major fixes. This meant that the KPPLess jailbreaks wouldn’t be able to use Cydia or Cydia Substrate so something needed to be done in order to get users the full jailbreak experience. After lots of work by Coolstar and another members of the community, the Electra jailbreak on iOS 11-11.1.2 can finally achieve the following:

• Run Cydia and have it work properly. This means that you can do all the normal actions such as installing, uninstalling and updating packages like you could before.
  

  Cydia can now install packages (which include tweaks) on iOS 11 when jailbroken with Electra!

• Run a great deal of Cydia Substrate tweaks through ‘Substitute’ and ‘Substrate Compatibility layer’ so that you’ll be able to customise and install those quality of life tweaks that make your iDevice that much better.

As you can see, these were the two major hurdles that KPPLess jailbreaks, such as the aforementioned Electra and Meridian, had to surpass and now they’ve finally done it! The Meridian jailbreak (mostly of interest for iPhone 7/Plus and iPad Pro 2nd gen users on iOS 10.2-10.3.3) is also at a similar stage.

Electra RC1 on the horizon

A few hours ago, CoolStar (the main guy behind Electra) tweeted that Electra RC1 will [soon] be available to developers. As with naming conventions of other iOS jailbreaks, an RC (release candidate) release typically means that the jailbreak is ready for the public to use although some bugs may still be there.

That being said, you can expect a public release when common packages, such as Filza and RocketBootstrap are updated to fully work with the Electra jailbreak so hopefully, the wait will only be a

iPhone 7 users on iOS 10.2-10.3.3 rejoice as the wait will soon be over!

week or two at most.

Conclusion

The fact that KPPLess jailbreaks are now almost finished is quite a big deal since KPP bypasses are becoming even harder to achieve due to hardware-based kernel patch protection (KPP) on Apple A10 and newer SoCs from the company. Thanks to KPPLess, the jailbreak works on all iDevices running that particular iOS release so newer devices won’t be left in the cold anymore like what happened with the iPhone 7 in the iOS 10 days.

Jailbreak subreddit (or Coolstar’s twitter sometimes): https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/

CoolStar’s Twitter (updates on Electra): https://twitter.com/coolstarorg

Sparkey’s Twitter (updates on Meridian): https://twitter.com/iBSparkes