Pwn20wnd says Cydia works on iOS 13, but Substrate may require minor updates

Just yesterday, hacker and unc0ver jailbreak lead developer Pwn20wnd confirmed that both Cydia and Cydia Substrate would run without any turbulence on iOS 12.2. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the announcement led many to ask if the same would be true about Apple’s upcoming iOS 13 update, which is poised to drop sometime this Fall.

Pwn20wnd appeared to share this same curiosity, and so he deployed Cydia and Cydia Substrate on an emulated and pre-jailbroken installation of the iOS 13 beta to find out. The results of his test were announced on Twitter early this morning:

From what we can gather, the Cydia app itself appears to work fine on iOS 13, but this shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to anyone since we’ve seen Cydia being teased on the iOS 13 beta before.

That aside, the real question lies with Cydia Substrate, which we often take for granted when enjoying our jailbreaks. It is the framework that permits tweak injection on pwned handsets, and if you’ve ever installed a jailbreak tweak before, then you’ve likely used Cydia Substrate (unless you’re using Chimera, which utilizes Substitute instead).

Pwn20wnd notes that Cydia Substrate should work on iOS 13 “with minor changes,” but it’s unclear what those changes are and whether it would necessitate work on Saurik’s end. As we know already, Saurik doesn’t particularly enjoy working on Cydia Substrate, and it remains to be seen if he will continue maintaining it beyond its current state.

In a follow-up Tweet, Pwn20wnd mentions that much of his motivation to test the software on iOS 13 came from the fact that people often crucify Cydia and Cydia Substrate by referring to it as “old” or “outdated” software. Realistically, however, these platforms have been actively updated for modern jailbroken versions of iOS, with the most recent maintenance occurring in the past year with the launch of unc0ver.

iOS 13 is still in its beta stages at the time of this writing, and this means that Apple could still change a lot in the software before the final release this Fall. That said, we still don’t know if or when an iOS 13 jailbreak will be released, and if so, whether Cydia and Cydia Substrate will still work as expected when that time comes.

Are you excited by Pwn20wnd’s most recent confirmations? Let us know in the comments section below.