I have spent the last 15 years owning jailbroken iPhones, iPod touches, iPads, and even Apple TVs. At the very beginning, it was my friends who encouraged me to try it. I was always skeptical, thinking it would cause issues with my device or void my warranty with Apple. But after I tried it, I never really looked back.
For me, it all began with jailbreak tools like Spirit, greenpois0n, limera1n, and redsn0w. It seemed like it was always no time at all before jailbreak developers came out with a jailbreak for modern firmware. Around this time, I became so interested in jailbreaking that when the channels I followed announced they were looking for jailbreak-oriented writers, I jumped on it, and I started my career out of it.
The jailbreak community was always bustling during those first few years. Each day, I would turn on my device and launch the Cydia package manager, and there would be some type of new jailbreak tweak to try. At the time, most add-ons were free and single purpose, so there was always something enticing available when the repository managers pushed their daily refreshes.
But those memories are becoming a faint blur for me; not only did they go by so quick, but the community also changed. Fast-forward to the iOS 9-ish era, and it felt like jailbreaks weren’t being released as often as they were in the beginning. Since then, jailbreaks have gotten progressively more labor intensive to build, and fewer developers are either skilled enough to build one or willing to invest time and resources to make a free release.
Fast-forwarding even more, to the iOS 11 era, it seemed like we were waiting a very long time for a jailbreak to drop. We eventually got the Electra jailbreak, and then unc0ver followed shortly after some community drama when the developers who made these jailbreaks weren’t getting along. Around this time, a fractured jailbreak community became more divided as groups of people either followed one camp or another.
These developer politics would continue long into the iOS 14 era, after which the developers on both sides of what seemed like a silent cold war appeared to fall off the face of the Earth because of alternative interests. This left vacuum in the community, which became filled by those who either wanted to keep jailbreaking or who increasingly felt it was becoming a dying hobby.
Despite this divide, there were still plenty of developers making jailbreak tweaks for Apple’s platforms, keeping jailbreaking exciting for those users who were fortunate enough to have a jailbroken handset at their disposal. Unfortunately, Apple wasn’t making it any easier for users to downgrade their firmware, and after a single buggy jailbreak tweak or boot loop, many users lost their jailbreaks during a restore, which killed their interest.
When iOS 15 rolled around, it wasn’t until a developer-oriented jailbreak called Fugu15 came about that jailbreak developers in our community became enlightened enough by a unique installation method to create the Dopamine jailbreak for the public. The Dopamine jailbreak lived on well into the iOS 16 era, and around this time, the jailbreak community seemed like it was getting less politicized, but there were still fall-outs between developers occasionally.
Dopamine was released alongside an interesting utility called TrollStore, which allowed users to permanently install unsigned apps on their device due to a CoreTrust exploit. But more than that, those apps could utilize elevated privileges that traditional App Store apps could not. This, along with the Procursus team’s years’-long efforts to make a powerful bootstrap, opened the door to what we call semi-jailbreaks like Serotonin to exist in the midst of no new jailbreak releases.
Once Apple axed the checkm8 exploit-vulnerable line of iPhones starting with iOS 17, that’s when it became clear to me that jailbreaking was on its last legs. Not only hadn’t we seen a new jailbreak release for a long time, but tweak developers were either growing out of the hobby and not releasing new jailbreak tweaks anymore, or they were just building ‘reborn’ or ‘remake’ tweaks with no originality. Very few developers continued to maintain their older tweaks, which exacerbated this.
When iOS 18 came out, and there still wasn’t a jailbreak for iOS 17, interest in jailbreaking exponentially declined. Posts about the death of iPhone jailbreaking were regular occurrences on the /r/jailbreak community, and jailbreak tweak releases went from being several each week to just one each week, if jailbreakers were even that lucky.
At the time of this writing, as iOS 26 is now just over the horizon (Apple skipped over iOS 19 and went straight to naming it iOS 26), there still isn’t a public jailbreak for any firmware newer than iOS 16, and the many developers that always brought us jailbreaks have repeatedly confirmed the writing on the walls that we’ve been gawking at for years.
Jailbreaking iPhones is officially a thing of the past.
A combination of Apple’s relentless hardening of software security combined with bounty programs designed to sponge up all the community’s potentially useful bugs and exploits has created a deficit so large in the jailbreak community, that even seasoned jailbreak developers who are willing to make jailbreak tools lack the resources needed to make them.
As a result, so few developers even make jailbreak tweaks anymore, as there’s no real living to be made from their work. Consequently, users are flocking to modern firmware releases to get new features and improvements directly from Apple.
Longtime neveropen readers will know that I’ve always made curated lists showcasing features in Apple’s latest mobile operating systems that appear to mimic functionalities of jailbreak tweaks that have long existed within our community. This was no accident. Apple actively stifled jailbreaking over several years, then hired up the community’s talent, and used feedback from longtime jailbreakers to improve iOS for everyone.
Today, iOS is more powerful of a mobile operating system than it ever was, adopting features that make it not only aesthetically pleasing, but also full of features. Many iPhone users even question why they would ever want to jailbreak again, and this proves that the soul of jailbreaking – having the freedom to do what you want with your device, outside of Apple’s walled garden – is truly dead.
People just don’t care anymore. They’ll drink Apple’s Kool-Aid.
Jailbreaking will never be what it was, and thanks to Apple’s efforts, it’s going to stay that way, probably forever going forward. This community has an extreme shortage of developers, knowledge, and talent, and those who were extremely gifted and who kept the community afloat for so long, have moved on into their professional careers and away from this hobby.
Having said all of this, many neveropen readers must be wondering, “why?” I’ve been thinking long and hard about it for the past several years, as there has been plenty of time to let my mind wander amid having less and less to write about, and here’s my answer:
Jailbreaking was the world’s answer to Apple releasing amazing hardware and extremely limited software. When users wanted more, Apple declined to provide it, and those same users found a way to make it work. Apple’s software has gotten so good today that now the inverse feels true. I now hear people saying that Apple isn’t innovating and that the newest iPhone hardware feels just like the last. Sadly, no jailbreak tweak can fix that.
Apple didn’t just ignore the jailbreak community and hope it would go away; they took notes. They sat back in the sidelines and watched, listened, and strategized about how they could both secure the devices we use so tightly that we’d give up on jailbreaking them and give us the features we’ve been asking for so that we wouldn’t look for third-party methods.
Fast-forward to today, and we can now officially customize the Lock Screen, organize our Home Screen the way we want to, use widgets, and more. While these upgrades will never fully replace the feeling I once felt for customizing my device through jailbreaking, I’ll admit that there’s something of a boiled frog syndrome here. After drinking the Kool-Aid for so long, I don’t daily drive a jailbroken device anymore; it’s more of a secondary interest to me.
This is the first time I’ve ever publicly acknowledged this because I’ve always wanted to hope there was light at the end of this dark tunnel. But Apple won. I don’t think jailbreaking will ever be what it once was, ever again. I stayed around until the bitter end, but now I stand right alongside all the people that previously walked away from this hobby as the life support machine that kept jailbreaking alive slowed down and eventually stopped.
The interest just isn’t there for me anymore.
All that aside, I’m still very proud that I jumped on this train and experienced everything that I did. I’m happy I met all the jailbreak developers along the way and learned so much from them. Jailbreaking iPhones and iPads, and even Apple TVs has been a thrilling part of my life for so long, and I won’t ever forget the joys that it brought me during that time. For that reason, I offer my thanks to the entire community.
