So Apple pushed out iOS 13.5.1 yesterday, and if you weren't paying close attention you probably updated without thinking twice, same as always. I want to talk about why that update mattered a lot more than the changelog let on.
Back on May 23rd, the unc0ver team (basically one guy, Pwn20wnd, doing an absurd amount of work) dropped unc0ver 5.0.0, a jailbreak that worked on basically everything from iOS 11 up through 13.5. That's not a niche exploit for some old abandoned version, that's the jailbreak working on phones people are using right now, today, running the current software. It used a kernel bug Apple had actually already disclosed themselves in the 13.5 release notes back in May, credited to a security researcher, and somehow nobody moved fast enough (or cared enough) to patch it before it got weaponized into a public jailbreak tool. Nine days later, 13.5.1 shows up with exactly one line in the security notes fixing that bug. Nine days. That's the whole lifespan.
I dug my old iPhone SE out of a drawer specifically to try it, because there is no way I'm putting a public jailbreak on the phone I actually need for two-factor codes and my banking apps. That's not paranoia, that's just what you do now if you want to mess around with this stuff. I spent probably two hours getting Cydia installed, getting a couple of tweaks working, poking around a filesystem I haven't had real access to since an iPhone 5, and it was genuinely fun in a way that felt almost nostalgic. Not because the tweaks themselves were amazing (a status bar clock tweak and a way to force apps into split view, nothing revolutionary) but because there's something about actually owning the device you paid for that the last few years of iOS have quietly trained us out of expecting.
And then, less than 48 hours after I got it all set up, it's patched. Gone. Not on my SE specifically since I obviously didn't update that one, but the window is closed for everyone else, and eventually I'll have to update it too or just leave a phone frozen on a random point version forever, which honestly a lot of jailbreak people do, it's a whole lifestyle of never touching the software update button again.
I keep going back and forth on how I feel about this. Part of me thinks Apple patching a serious kernel vulnerability within nine days of it going public is exactly what a responsible vendor should do, full stop, no argument. That's a real security hole, it wasn't a benign toy. But part of me also thinks the speed itself is the tell. When it's a security bug that's just sitting there unexploited, patches can take months, whole point releases go by. The second it becomes a tool that lets users install their own software without going through the App Store, suddenly it's an emergency. I don't think that's a coincidence and I don't think Apple would say it's a coincidence either if you got someone off the record.
Anyway, this isn't a jailbreak blog and I'm not about to become one nine years in. I mostly wanted to write this down because I think this is the last easy public jailbreak we're going to see for a while, at least on anything current. The scene used to have three or four different teams releasing tools every year, arguing on Twitter about who found what first. Now it's basically down to unc0ver and a couple of others, and the windows keep shrinking. Nine days. A few years ago that would've been considered fast for Apple even to acknowledge a jailbreak existed, let alone kill it.
The SE is back on 13.5 for now, sitting on my desk next to the coffee mug, and I genuinely don't know if I'll bother updating it or just let it become the permanent jailbroken phone I poke at once a month out of curiosity. Probably the second one. It's already been relegated to "the phone I use to test things," which at this point might be the most honest use for a phone I've had in years.