iOS 6 Untethered Jailbreak For iPhone 5 Exists On iOS 6.0.2; Planetbeing Urges Users To Be Patient As iOS 6.1 Release Nears

Many people even thought that the Dev Teams involved in iOS jailbreaking had given up on a future iOS 6 untethered jailbreak as the last few months had been annoyingly silent in terms of any significant update relating to the highly anticipated exploit.

However, a recent post on Reddit by renowned iOS hacker Planetbeing revived the lost hope. The hacker, instrumental in many popular jailbreaks in the past, has confirmed in his post that he has an untethered iOS 6.0.2 jailbreak running on his own iPhone 5.

“Yeah, I’m not really sure what all the doom and gloom is about. The fact is, I have an untethered iOS 6.0.2 JB running on my iPhone 5 right now,” said Planetbeing.

So what could be the reason for not releasing the jailbreak if it already exists? Planetbeing has given a couple of reasons for that. According to him, it’s mostly about timing.

“The reasons it’s not released are because 1. releasing it would burn an exploit we want to save for ourselves so we can always get in to look at new firmware and help JB in the future, 2. iOS 6.1 is coming very soon and will likely break a small part of it anyway, there’s no point in sacrificing the many bugs it won’t break,” Planetbeing added.

The hacker said that while the existing untethered solution on his iPhone 5 was mainly based on “4+ bugs,” a couple of more bugs were still needed to get it done. Given that, according to Planetbeing, jailbreaking is not dying down.

“Anyway, where there are 4+ bugs (that it took to get this to work), there’s gotta be one or two more so while jailbreaking is getting harder, reports of its death are highly exaggerated,” said Planetbeing. “This is not stuff I want to say over Twitter with 140 characters because I’m afraid of starting some sort of riot, but I like the smaller /r/jailbreak community more.”

When one user asked how often did Apple fix the bugs that made the jailbreak developers find and save bugs in favor of a future jailbreak, Planetbeing replied saying:

“Sometimes they do. It depends on the type of bug. It's a risk. That's of course a drawback with sitting on things like this, but I was not the discoverer of all of the bugs I used so not releasing is a collective call.”

Following Planetbeing’s post, many other Reddit users appreciated his work.

“Its just nice to hear from on of the devs, its been realy gloomy lately, and Ive had to get used to an iPhone without JB....and it sucks. THANKS AND KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!!!” posted one user.

“I think the best thing is actually hearing that work is going on behind the scenes… Keep on working hard PB & good luck to all the JB Devs working to free our devices... My iPhone 5 is waiting,” said another user.

So, does finding a crucial bug and keeping it secret for a long term seem reasonable to you? According to Jeff Benjamin of iDownloadBlog, it does make sense for him.

“Makes total sense if you ask me. I’d rather wait a while longer for a potential iOS 6.1 jailbreak, instead of releasing it now and having it potentially stamped out when Apple decides to go ahead and drop iOS 6.1,” he said.

After a long silence in the iOS jailbreaking scene, well-known iOS hacker pod2g said in a recent interview that he honestly believed that iOS 6 would eventually be jailbroken. However, he did indicate that jailbreaking was getting tougher day by day with Apple increasingly strengthening up the security in iOS.

Last week, pod2g took to Twitter to get a hashtag, “#weWantAnOpeniOS,” trending. He also said that the fact that there was no jailbreak for iPhone 5 might push Apple to open iOS a little more for tweaks and mods.

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