Jailbreak tweaks are generally installed on iPhones and iPads that have been jailbroken, but the community has been hard at work on utilities that allow tweak injection to exist on non-jailbroken devices by way of kernel exploits such as kernel file descriptor (kfd) and the new CoreTrust bug utilized by TrollStore 2.
Just this weekend, iOS developer @mineekdev took to X (formerly Twitter) to share what appears to be a working tweak injection method for iOS & iPadOS 16 devices vulnerable to the kfd exploit that can be installed using the TrollStore perma-signing utility.
There is a particularly giant asterisk though, and you should be vividly familiar with it before you consider giving this a try. There’s a very real possibility of boot-looping your device, and for that reason, most users should avoid using this (and even advanced users should avoid using this on their main device).
Project lead developer @mineekdev echoed this warning when announcing it via their Discord server:
The warning below:
I am not responsible for boot-loops or anything. Keep a backup and do not try this on your main device. Although it shouldn’t boot-loop, do not get angry at me when it does. This is your warning.
The warning may sound particularly familiar to that of jailbreaking. If you remember, there was always a “try this at your own risk” attached to jailbreak tools a long time ago, and while we see a lot less of that today, there’s always an inherent risk to device stability when it comes to hacking.
In any case, it’s still really neat to see developers making things like this because it demonstrates what may be possible with the tools we have at our disposal currently.
It may be possible for some of these hacks and methods to be made safer in the future as the projects evolve, so users should probably just sit tight to see what happens instead of using it themselves, or better yet, wait for the iOS & iPadOS 16.0-16.5.1 jailbreak that should be possible on arm64e devices when Kaspersky publishes a writeup on their PPL bypass.
What are your thoughts on running tweak injection without a jailbreak? Discuss in the comments section down below.