Following the Sileo Team’s decision to end support for the XinaA15 jailbreak over the weekend, it looks like the popular Zebra package manager is on the same path.
In a post posted on the Mastodon platform this week, the Zebra team announced a similar solution, as quoted below:
I think everyone already understood that this is the case, but based on Sileo’s decision to stop supporting XinaA15, we are going to clarify that Zebra no longer plans to support it.
We’re extremely grateful to Xina for their work, and the semi-rootless nature of XinaA15 helped to start pushing tweakers towards “correct”rootlessness. Unfortunately, tricking rooted binaries into working without root requires a lot of hacks, and trying to get this to work with every package has always been a challenge. Even the latest version of XinaA15 had some difficulty getting around weird edge cases after many of us worked with Xina to fix bugs.
One of the most broken components was APT/dpkg, which was not compiled correctly for semi-rootless access. It was @anamy’s incredible work that allowed XinaA15 to have a working package manager at all, even if it wasn’t perfect.
We now have palera1n and Fugu15 Max taking us to the next stage of non-root jailbreak, so it’s extremely rare that it feels right to stop supporting a particular jailbreak.
The “correct”rootless is a pain in the ass, we know. We know that not everything is updated yet. But it’s worth the effort for a healthier package ecosystem.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk. By the way, Zebra bug fix update 1.1.31 is coming soon.
The bottom line of the post is that while the Zebra team is extremely grateful to @xina520 for the hard work, the hackish nature of trying to get root binaries to work on a rootless jailbreak, as XinaA15 did, caused a lot of headaches in fixing bugs and building others. The software works flawlessly. And in fact, Amy Weale from the Sileo team echoed the same sentiment when she decided to end Sileo support for XinaA15.
Many ordinary non-developers who have not been dissatisfied with attempts to support XinaA15 can quickly criticize the decisions of these teams, but do not understand the inner workings of what is involved in creating these tools and trying to support a jailbreak through such means. there is a lot going on under the hood, only the developers of the project can really justify these decisions.
It’s worth noting that the Fugu15 Max jailbreak for arm64e devices running iOS and iPadOS 15.0-15.4.1 has been recommended as an alternative to XinaA15, and will eventually be renamed once it leaves public beta. In addition, talk of canceling XinaA15 due to the ongoing progress of Fugu15 Max also recommended switching to Fugu15 Max.
While it’s unfortunate to see a jailbreak fail, developers know when another project will yield better results for end users, as is the case with Fugu15 Max, as it supports more firmware than XinaA15 and seems to be easier to develop for, especially given the strong push to non-root jailbreak dynamics.
Are you upset that Zebra will no longer support the XinaA15 jailbreak? You can let us know in the comments section below.