Before the Dopamine v2 jailbreak came out, the Serotonin semi-jailbreak was all the rage because it allowed users to install and use various forms of jailbreak tweaks without the full jailbreak environment. Serotonin remains relevant on iOS & iPadOS 16.5.1-16.6.1 even today because these firmware versions aren’t yet jailbreakable on arm64e devices. Serotonin, on the other hand, does support them.
But Serotonin isn’t without its flaws, which is why iOS developer Nathan (@dedbeddedbed) is working on a fork of the project current called NathanLR, but likely to be renamed in the future as the project progresses.
NathanLR is still basically a semi-jailbreak like Serotonin was, but with a few added perks. In a conversation with Nathan, we learned that NathanLR offers benefits over Serotonin including support for rootless jailbreak tweaks and the use of the TrollInstallerX kernel exploit.
The former is important because support for rootless jailbreak tweaks means that more jailbreak tweaks made recently will work with NathanLR than will work with Serotonin. While it was always possible to patch jailbreak tweaks to make them run, this required additional work by the end user.
The latter is important because the TrollInstallerX kernel exploit is more reliable and has a higher success rate than the Kernel File Descriptor exploit used by the Serotonin semi-jailbreak.
Some other benefits of the NathanLR semi-jailbreak fork of Serotonin include the fact that there are a lot more supported daemons to hook into, including jailbreak launch daemons, a functional userspace reboot, and the fact that the device will actually turn off when turned off as opposed to crashing and turning back on as it would with the Serotonin semi-jailbreak.
While NathanLR only supports iOS & iPadOS versions 16.5.1-16.6.1 and Serotonin supports iOS & iPadOS versions 16.0-16.6.1, it’s worth noting that this isn’t important because the Dopamine v2 full-fledged jailbreak already supports iOS & iPadOS 16.0-16.5.
As of right now, we consider NathanLR to be a beta project, and as such, we suggest holding off for a little bit until it matures further. Still, more advanced users may not feel threatened by such a proclamation and may move forward with it anyway for testing purposes. The developer shared a link to the project on X (formerly Twitter) as there is currently no official website as of yet.
As we continue to follow the project, we will keep our readers informed about it.
Are you planning to make use of NathanLR, or will you continue using Dopamine or Serotonin? Let us know in the comments section down below.
