iOS 7 Jailbreak: Screenshot Of Jailbroken iPod Touch Running iOS 7 Appears As Hacker P0sixninja Reveals ‘Openjailbreak’ Plans

Even before the introduction of Apple’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS 7 last month, the jailbreak community had been haunted by the question, 'Will the next iOS version be jailbroken?'

Now, it appears that the re-designed iteration of the operating system's latest version, which is currently under beta and will not be released until this fall, has already been jailbroken.

Ryan Petrich, an iOS hacker, took to his Twitter account, on Sunday, and posted a screenshot of his jailbreak app Activator, which was apparently running on an iPod touch with the iOS 7 installed. The image displayed stock icons, such as Contacts, Safari and Maps in the dock, while showing some flat text in the alert box and the Activator icon on the top left corner of the Home screen.

Speculations are rife that Petrich could have used some sort of simulator to run Activator on the iOS 7-powered iPod touch instead of jailbreaking it. But, the flat text in the alert box supports the hacker’s claim because this particular type of alert -- seen in the image below -- cannot be generated by running a simulation, iDownloadBlog reported.

It is unknown how Petrich managed to run a jailbreak tweak on an iOS 7-running iPod touch, but his post does hold out hope for those looking forward to an iOS 7 jailbreak.

Hot on the heels of Petrich’s show, well known iOS hacker Joshua Hill, commonly known as p0sixninja, also sent out a significant message through Twitter on Monday, elaborating on his plans for something “bigger than jailbreak,” which he announced last week.

“Ok, I hate redsn0w, I hate sn0wbreeze, and I hate 6.1.3. I’m ready to get this #openjailbreak off the ground,” p0sixninja tweeted.

But, what did the hacker mean by “openjailbreak”?

“What I have learned is that it will be an open source jailbreak repository managed by a team headed by Joshua Hill,” Joe Rossignol of iFans.com said, adding that renowned graphic designer Thientam Bach, also known as Surenix, is working on the website for the repository.

“Essentially it’s going to be a repository of open source jailbreak components that I created over the years,” Rossignol quoted p0sixninja as saying. “So much of my code has been hacked up and incorporated into other projects, it’s becoming very fragmented. There’s no central repository to maintain all this code, to allow other developers to submit patches or help layout a roadmap for what new features and abilities will be added in the future.”

An open source jailbreak repository will benefit the jailbreak community by helping users contribute and learn from the code. This kind of cross-collaboration is expected to eventually make way for quicker discovery of jailbreak exploits for iOS 7 and beyond, in the future.

In addition, p0sixninja also old Rossignol that openjailbreak “is just a small part of an ultimate plan.” The hacker did not reveal much about his plans, but theories abound that p0sixninja has discovered a bootrom exploit, a low-level exploit that can jailbreak any suitable iOS device regardless of the firmware.

Everything is in the air at present, but the developments in the jailbreak scene clearly suggest that something very big is about take place on the jailbreak front, and Petrich’s jailbreak tweak Activator running on iOS 7 may not be just a coincidence, after all.