Apple’s been waging a war against jailbreaking for a long time, taking every opportunity to close loopholes and make the process more difficult for users. This has led many to wonder whether their upcoming iOS 7 release will jailbreakable at all – but it appears there’s some encouraging news! According to iOS hacker and jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich, the iOS 7 beta has indeed already been jailbroken.
Petrich, who is best known for developing jailbreak tweets such as Activator, posted an image to Twitter recently showing an image of a jailbroken iPod touch running iOS 7, renewing hope that a jailbreak might remain possible for the final release. Petrich didn’t elaborate much on the image – but it should serve as a good sign that progress is being made.
As always with Apple’s betas, everything is subject to change – Apple could easily close the loophole that Petrich used to install Activator on his iPod touch. It’s also possible that the jailbreak will only work on certain devices – and even then, it’s unknown whether the final result will be a tethered jailbreak (requiring a fresh exploit every time a device reboots) or an untethered one, and how long it might take to make such a jailbreak stable and usable for the majority of users.
It’s likely that he’s not to keep to share any details about the jailbreak, for fear of it catching Apple’s attention, causing them to close the exploit he used and force him to find a new one. So, while this should be taken as a good sign that iOS 7 can be jailbroken, it’s important to remember that there’s still a long road ahead regarding any public jailbreaking tool – even if Apple doesn’t patch the loophole, and even it the current method does work for most or all devices.
For jailbreakers, however, there’s at least some lasting hope to hold onto as Apple’s iOS 7 gets more refined ahead of its expected fall release.
