iOS 4.1 Jailbreak for iPhone UPDATE

Wed 08/09/10

Until I have a packaged jailbreak I'm going to just update this single post with news of progress. When the jailbreak arrives I'll do a proper new post.

I checked this morning before leaving for work and iTunes said that iOS 4.02 was the latest software. The same tonight about 5pm when I got home. At 7ish however it was available for download. iOS 4.1 has landed.

Before downloading 4.1 I copied 4.02 to a folder on my PC. When you download a new version iTunes auto deletes the old version. In the case of 4.01 and 4.02 you have needed to have a copy of the older version 4.0 in order to jailbreak (for those of us that could) or downgrade (for those that tried but couldn't). So I'll now keep copies of each version of iOS 4 until iOS 5 comes out.

Around 9 I read on Redmond Pie that a jailbreak has been tested and works. There's no date of release yet but I'd imagine it will be within the week. To be honest I think that Redsn0w would probably still work for my 3G and some of the older 3GS's but I don't want to try it.

The good news on the new jailbreak is that it's what's known as a hardware exploit. Not quite as easy to install as Spirit or Jailbreak me were but, because they've found a way round the hardware it should continue to work on all devices already produced or in production regardless of new launches like 4.2 coming in November. The result is that if you already own an iphone you should be able to continue jail breaking it until the hardware becomes so dated that it cant handle new software. That's why 3G owners were able to Jailbreak iOS 4.02 when no-one else could.

The bad news is that Apple will act quickly to alter the hardware and close this loop hole. When they do the owners of new phones and iPads will have to wait a while for the jail breakers to find another solution. For those that can afford the latest kit that's an issue because Apple upgrade and re-spec their kit regularly and most of it is pretty desirable.

One last bit of advice for tonight. It's entirely possible that by the time I wake up tomorrow the jailbreak will be out there. You can probably tell that I'm eager to upgrade. If like me your watching websites awaiting news then... try not to be the first. When the headline says Released, Tested and Working take a breath. Read the comments. Is it working? Are folk having problems or reporting crashes and conflicts? When I upgraded to 4.02 it worked OK but even basics like Installous weren't working and most of the Repos were missing so it was two days later before my phone was back to normal.

09/09/2010

It's widely reported that the new jailbreak has been tested and seems to work on iPhones, Ipads and iPod touches but still no news of a release date or even any decent speculation.

There's also been nothing to say that Redsn0w would work to allow 3g users to get ahead of the game. To be fair though I haven't really found anything from any 3g users to say whether it has speeded up their phones so maybe we're not missing too much.

I'll be posting my normal weekly blog over the weekend but will continue to update this post until some news comes up.

10/09/2010

Still no news although there is an unofficial jailbreak that is working for the 3GS (old Bootrom). Try the Redmond Pie link on this page for full instructions. Anyway in my search I found this clip. Who says there's an app for everything?

11/09/2010

Rumours are surfacing that, as suspected, the original Redsn0w 9.5b5 is working to jailbreak iphone 3g and, i believe iPod touch 2g. I'm reluctant to try it yet as users are reporting issues with the phone icon disappearing (quite essential to have a phone icon on a phone I would think) and also some wifi problems. Having said that, both the sites that I came across offering instructions on how to go about this jailbreak got it wrong and subsequently this may be the reason why it didn't work properly.

I've posted new instructions on both sites via the comments section and asked someone to post if they work. My idea is that one of the guys who has already lost their jaibreak would have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying my method and, if it works, then I could try. The sites involved are: coveringweb.com and spiritjb.org

I also emailed admin at Redmond Pie to make them aware of this potential jailbreak because, in my experience, they will test it on their own phones before putting it out.

Update

Looks like covering web have taken their post down without any apology or explanation to those that they misled. Poor show I say.

16/09/2010

An answer to the continual question of 'when will there be an official Jailbreak for 4.1?' was posted by @pod2g today saying that the SHAtter exploit which uses a Jailbreak called greenpois0n (http://www.greenpois0n.com/) will go live tomorrow. It could be someone masquerading as a member of the Chronic dev-team or it could finally be time. We'll know tomorrow.

My 3g is just not reliable enough running 4.02. When it works it's good but there is just no rhyme or reason to whether it is going to work or not. If the Jailbreak comes out tomorrow I'll try it tomorrow. If not then I'll take a chance and run redsn0w on Saturday. If it works great but, if not, the sim is going to go back into my HTC touch diamond. It may be two years older and possibly lacks some of the bows and bells that iPhone has but, all of the functionality that it did have worked. Can't say that for the iphone. This bad boy could find itself in a drawer soon. Jobs insists that he's creating the perfect device and that is why he doesn't want it hacked. The problem is that most of us have older versions. Each time a new version of the iPhone comes out he forgets all about the millions stuck with the older kit. It's well documented that my issues aren't the result of my jailbreak. The 3g just doesn't work on os4.

17/09/2010

I thought we'd have a jailbreak today but it appears not. Chronic dev-team created this update which was accessed from their comments page but was a new blog item. (Love the work these guys do but they really are a bit guilty of high drama. What's wrong with a regular update on the regular blog page every Friday or whatever? Anyhow)

'Many people in the comments are asking for a progress update. Any kind of update that we could actually give would be too technical for anyone to understand anyway, not to mention potentially reveal the exploit. Just know that things are going swimmingly and we are working as hard as we can. Any demos, screenshots, or *cough* download links will be posted to this blog before anywhere else, so keep an eye out!' The blog can be found here Chronic-Dev.org
Keep watching

Prepare to Jailbreak iOS 4.1 for iPhone 3G Part 1

It's the jailbreak blogs turn tonight folks so if iPhones mean nothing to you or your iPhone means more than life itself you may want to skip this one.

At some point tomorrow Apple will release iOS 4.1 for all variants of iPhone and some ipod touches. The new software offers a few new features, Ping (a kind of face book of music that I don't really see the point of but that will no doubt become something you can't live without), Game Center which offers online gaming and high def video for the iPhone 4. All good stuff but given the hassle of re-jail breaking and then restoring all my apps and all my settings probably I could bear to live without these changes. However.....

There will also be a camera improvement called HSD. It's not available for the 3g but I've already read that, a bit like multitasking, jail broken 3gs will have an app that allows them to use it. Given how shit my phones camera is any software that improves the resolution and quality of a shot is a must. In addition to this Mr Jobs has said that it will allow the operating system to run faster on a 3g. Thank you thank you thank you.

iOS 4.0 did bring some functionality and gimmicks that made it worth upgrading but god has it slowed the 3g down. I know that that's probably not helped by jail breaking the phone to over perform but it was seriously faster and less buggy, jail broken or not, before 4 came along. There are You Tube videos showing how slow the three has become (jail broken or not).

So I want to upgrade to 4.1 as quickly as possible but, as always, there's a problem. Someone has to jailbreak it before I upgrade or I'd lose loads of functionality. My phone is themed to within an inch of its life. It doesn't look anything like an iphone. I'd lose that. My 3g reception goes to sleep with my phone saving battery life. I'd lose that. If I find something in google maps I've got a button that allows me to navigate there using tomtom. I'd lose the button and the tomtom. I've got an app that makes my Internet think that 3g is wifi and so allows live streaming. I'd lose that. Multi tasking. Yep that too. Forget one or two stolen apps it's the functionality I'd miss.

I suspect that the dev-team are pretty much good to go with some jailbreaks for this one. They may even be ready already and I'm hoping that some version of Redsn0w is pretty much ready to launch with a version of jailbreak me following within the first fortnight. But even with this it can still be a hassle so I've taken some steps to prepare in advance. Watch this space and I'll let you know how they go.

I use a winterboard theme called iEllegance. However I wasn't 100% on the out of the packet theme so I replaced the clock with a natty HTC flip clock, I've created Icons for my specific app set and I've changed the wallpaper and lock screen. In addition I've fixed some glitches so I've removed the themes dock and restored the original and I've taken the shadows off buttons because they were offset. As a newbie that has taken bloody ages. When you re-jailbreak you start again. In other words download the default theme, download the clock,, find icons and make others etc... To avoid this I have copied the theme folder completely from my phone using a free software called WinSCP. (think it's this they are talking about when they mention SSHing something to your phone. It shows you the contents of the phone as a windows style file system and you just copy and paste files once you figure out your way around) Hopefully after jail breaking all I need to do is get winterboard running and then paste my theme back into the library where it's supposed to go.

On that note, I've also copied the winterboard application along with a few others. What's the chances that I can paste them straight back in without having to download again?

Until I try I've no idea if any or all of this will work. Without a jailbreak it's a waste of effort. Provided I can view and change the file structure of my phone then I stand a chance of making this work. So even if all the jailbreakers could achieve was to get OpenSSH running on the phone then we'd be good to go.

If all this did work then, who knows, I could be one step closer to understanding what all those dudes at the dev team are up to to jailbreak the phone in the first place.

It goes without saying that you should back your phone up on iTunes before upgrading to 4.1 or even considering jailbreaking. but even here there may be a slight problem:

I think Apple might be up to something a bit sneaky but I could just be being paranoid. When I turned iTunes on today it ceashed for the very first time with an error. Synchost had stopped responding tell microsoft about this prob. I thought nothing of it, as most people probably wouldn't, shut iTunes down and restarted. Now when I sync I get 'ITunes was unable to load provider data from sync services. Reconnect or ty again later'. The paranoid side of me thinks that this is some sort of software change aimed at either preventing jailbreaking or, more likely, unlocking. Of course it could just be that my software is nuts but there was no event leading up to this. After some experiments I did find that if I shut down MY3G, enabled 3g reception through SBSettings and then let the phone lock itself before connecting to iTunes then everything seemed to work but I've no idea why.

As soon as I've got any news on a jailbreak I'll be doing another iBlog. Hope that means that we will speak soon.

Interesting times.

TQ

TQs' Theory of iVolution

Welcome to the weekly(ish)iPhone blog/update. Some regular readers will not be too surprised to see that I have now become obsessed with the iPhone. Not that I'm an addictive personality type in any way (fags, booze) but this whole iPhone thing has me hooked. I thought I loved my HTC but it wasn't true love. The problem with the HTC (mine is a Touch Diamond with windows mobile version 6)is that it's windows based so works intuitively, syncs with my PC and basically does what I want to do when I want to do it. What fun is that?

Apple have created a phone that is entirely designed around controlling what you can do and when. Not only controlling you but even controlling the developers. That's where the fun starts. Someone bought one of these iPhones but didn't like being stuck with a single network provider. Realising that the phone was just a small PC they found a way to view the file structure of the phone and remove the network provider restriction. Opening the file structure became known as jail breaking, whilst altering the default provider is known as unlocking.

Once you can see the file structure (jail breaking) it's a relatively simple matter to start changing things and adding things. It's no more or less complicated than changing the wall paper on your PC. What's more if you get stuck there are a million forums that will help. (remind me to get back to that) If you get really stuck you can just restore your phone to its un-jail broken state and start again.

The changes that you make to a jail broken phone will be completely lost whenever iPhone upgrade the software which, in my experience, is about every six - eight weeks for minor tweaks and every six months for major operating system type overhauls. The tweaks aren't that big a problem as they are mostly attempts to fix or speed up a process and the Dev-Team as the jail breakers call themselves tend to be ahead of apple on this constantly. The result, a jail broken phone on OS4 is just as, if not more, up to date as an non jail broken phone using OS 4.02 so there is no real need to upgrade. Jail breakers however can't take advantage of an update until the Dev-Team have checked it out and worked out how to obtain the file structure again. For owners of the new iPhone four this is developing into quite an issue. For owners of older cheaper phones like my iPhone 3g with 8gb memory this is no problem at all and an up to date break is usually available within the first 24 hours of an update.

When you upgrade you have to redo the jail break. That involves several things. You need to run software to jailbreak. You need to install software providers known as 'repos' (I need three of these) and then you need re-install the apps that those programs provide. I use Appulous which allows you to install apps without using iTunes (perhaps apps that cost money that you might like to try before purchasing), my3g which makes my phone treat 3g reception as wifi so that I can watch TV on my phone even without wifi, iAddkiller which beats off pop up advertising that you should be forced to suffer according to apple, Finally you need Appsync. What Appsync does is allows you to view your iPhones file structure in the same way that you would view the C drive on your PC with folders, subfolders and files. After this is done you can also re-install your, perhaps, unpaid for apps which will still show against your phone but wont work until the jailbreak process is complete.

The final app I install after a jailbreak is known as winterboard. It's basically a skinning or theme app. Google it and you'll quickly discover that you don't need to be some sort of iClone. You can pretty much change the appearance of everything to suit yourself. There are off the shelf packages that will make loads of changes for you or, once you figure out how it's done, you can make changes yourself. The pic on the right in the ivolution image above is my phone as it presently looks. I downloaded a theme known as iElegance which gave me the background and changed some of my icons to the new look that you see. This theme had a clock and date function that I didn't like it so downloaded another theme called HTC springboard. I copied the files from the second theme and pasted them over the clock files from the first. I then searched google for iElegance type icons. There were loads of them and someone had even made a down loadable zip file so I downloaded this and set about altering my remaining icons. I removed the new folder icons by changing their file extensions and replaced them with new ones that matched my theme. Learning and doing took about three days.

The result shown above is exactly what I wanted. To be clear. If you had just wanted to transform your iPhone to look like an HTC there's a winterboard theme that will do that with weather and calender etc. What I wanted was the appearance of an HTC with the functionality of an iPhone. Thanks to jail breaking, Winterboard, theme developers and the dev-team that's exactly what I've got. If Apple allowed HTC to create an OS for their phone I doubt that it would look to much different. I prefer apples Icons and folders to HTCs menu bars but I prefer the HTC look. I've got it and it works.

In around two weeks there will be another apple update rumoured to be called 4.1. The upgrade will fix an issue with 3g reception. Will I upgrade? Yep. What I have done differently this time is that I have copied folders such as themes and jailbreak apps directly to my computer. My hope is that I can restore my jailbreak fully within 3 hours of an upgrade. If I can then it will be worth it.

Finally, for the most part the jailbreak community are pretty helpful. Loads of how to guides, loads of sites to help you keep up to date. I was surprised therefor with Modmyi.com. I posted three posts there as a newbie and did not get a single response. There was lots of help on the site but I think us newbies with our specific questions may be a bit simpleton for them.

Normal blog to follow and more of the 'iTry' next week.

Cheers
T