As many of us who have an iDevice know, iOS 12 has been able to fix most problems that iOS 11 brought to the table while also boosting performance back to iOS 10 levels on older devices. While it stayed unjailbroken for a while, it finally got a jailbreak (unc0ver) in late February which didn’t support older devices, but now that jailbreak finally supports all A7/A8 devices!

unc0ver updated to support A7/A8 devices with a very high success rate!

If you’re still rocking an iPad Air 1 or iPhone 5S that’s on iOS 12, you can now jailbreak your device (or use unc0ver’s n0ncesetter and shoot right back to iOS 10!)

For a while, there was a fair bit of grumbling in the jailbreak scene because, in January, older devices (A7/A8) didn’t work with Brandon Azad’s voucher_swap exploit out of the box. However, this was sorted out with tihmstar’s v3ntex (on iOS 12) a while later but then, 4K devices (Apple A7/A8) decided to still put up a fight as they didn’t work with Cydia Substrate‘s (a piece of software that lets you run tweaks on iOS) update for iOS 12. This meant that they couldn’t be jailbroken when unc0ver was updated with A9-A11 devices support on February 22.

Now, Cydia Substrate has been fixed on A7/A8 devices and unc0ver was also updated to add support for older devices! Other than that, unc0ver now includes iBSparkes‘ machswap exploit which provides a 95% success rate on A7/A8 devices (4K devices) running iOS 11.0-12.1.2. If you’re unsure what about which SoC is in your device, these are the devices that unc0ver currently supports:

• iPhone 5S to iPhone X
  • iPhone 5S (A7) and iPhone 6 (A8) support was added yesterday in unc0ver 3.0.0 beta 40
• iPad Air 1st generation to iPad Pro 10.5″/12.9″ 2nd generation
  • iPad Air 1st generation (A7) support was also added yesterday
• iPad Mini 2 to iPad Mini 4, and iPod Touch 6
  

  Contrary to what some want, Cydia isn’t dead and it’s the main (and only) package manager that comes bundled with unc0ver

  • iPad Mini 2/3 (A7) and iPod Touch 6 (A8) support was also added in yesterday’s update

This means that if you kept your older device on iOS 11 for a jailbreak, you can finally go to iOS 12 and enjoy the vastly superior performance while still maintaining your jailbreak. On the other hand, if you’re on still on iOS 10, you should think twice about updating because on my iPad Air 1, performance on iOS 10 is somewhat better than on iOS 12 especially when it comes to memory management!

In order to download unc0ver, check the download link below to grab the IPA file and install it via Cydia Impactor.

Current state of unc0ver/jailbreak for A12 devices

Unfortunately, in the iOS jailbreak scene, a vocal few don’t have much patience and as a result, pwn20wnd has been bombarded with requests for A12 support! (Image Source)

As all A12 devices come on iOS 12, there’s obviously no way to jailbreak them as of yet. This is because the A12 SoC has extra security measures, with the most significant one being PAC which still needs to be fully bypassed.

That being said, there is still ample hope for A12 devices getting a jailbreak soon because pwn20wnd is now actively working on supporting A12 devices since he was able to get unc0ver working on Apple A7/A8 devices! For now, the only thing that you can do is wait if you own one of Apple’s latest devices and perhaps play around with GeoFilza but make sure not to mess up any system files as you can forget jailbreaking in the near future if you end up in a bootloop!

Conclusion

To get unc0ver, simply follow the links below and report any issues to pwn20wnd through GitHub. If your device is currently on iOS 12.1.3/12.1.4/12.2 beta, you can STILL downgrade to iOS 12.1.1 beta 3 as Apple’s still signing it for some reason so if you want to jailbreak your iDevice, downgrade now! unc0ver only support iOS versions up to iOS 12.1.2 unless an exploit drops for a newer version.

On the other hand, if you’re already happily jailbroken on the latest major version of iOS, more good news has dropped as Ryan Petrich has released beta versions of Activator, Flipswitch and RocketBootstrap that work on iOS 12!

unc0ver download link (grab the latest build, b41 as of this article): https://github.com/pwn20wndstuff/Undecimus/releases

pwn20wnd’s Twitter (future updates): https://twitter.com/Pwn20wnd

pwn20wnd’s Patreon (for donating a few bucks as thanks for his hard work): https://www.patreon.com/Pwn20wnd

N.B: Yes, the featured image of this article was done with Paint as I don’t have a device that run unc0ver right now!