The situation around jailbreaking tools for Apple’s iOS continues to be strange and full of unknowns, and in some ways history is repeating itself. The OS is seemingly going through loops where Apple would release a new, better protected version, jailbreakers would fight against it, only to jump ship to the next version once it drops a few weeks/months later. As a result, there are many holes in the release history of the operating system where there are no jailbreaking tools available.
The situation with iOS 9.3.2 seems to be headed in the same way, too. There are currently no jailbreak tools available for the platform, and there are even rumors that teams are going to skip the version entirely and target iOS 9.3.3 instead. This could make sense given some past trends on the jailbreaking scene, especially if 9.3.3 is a more major release in terms of features.
On the other hand, there might not even be much of a point in releasing a jailbreak tool for iOS 9.3.2 if a new update is going to come out relatively shortly after that. This is one of the main issues for jailbreak developers – they have to split their resources between projects that are not guaranteed to be worthwhile.
Meanwhile, we’ve been seeing some alleged progress from Pangu, who claim to have cracked iOS 9.3.2 and 9.3.3, but haven’t released any official tools so far. It’s not even clear what we saw in the demo, as the group can easily fake the appearance of jailbreaking devices if they don’t allow users to actually try the tool for themselves.
There is another reason why jailbreakers would want to target iOS 9.3.3 instead of 9.3.2 – it’s claimed to be the last entry in the iOS 9 line before Apple transition their efforts to iOS 10. This means that people who want to stay on iOS 9 in the future will most likely be using version 9.3.3 exactly, making it that much more important to have a working, quality jailbreak tool available for it. 9.3.2 might end up irrelevant in the long run because of this.
Speaking of iOS 10, Pangu also teased a jailbreak tool for that version of the operating system, but we haven’t seen anything officially released yet. There are rumors that Apple have really stepped up the security of their OS in the latest major iteration, but then again, we keep hearing those rumors pretty much every time a new major version of iOS comes out.
And even if Apple do introduce new security measures, it’s only a matter of time before crackers are able to overcome them and release the appropriate tools to the public. We’ve seen jailbreak developers get stumped by some specific forms of protection in the past, but in the end it seems futile to keep trying to lock down the system so tightly. Apple could spend their efforts improving the security of the OS in other ways that are more useful to the end user.
As we’ve seen recently, it’s definitely important to have a secure, well-protected device in today’s world, and Apple are one of the companies taking this more seriously. They have been featured prominently in news reports related to the security of their phones, and users have a lot of trust in them as a result. It could even be argued that stopping the active development of anti-jailbreak protections could invalidate that trust to some extent.