There’s a new jailbreak tool in town, but before jumping to any conclusions and running after the dusty iOS or iPadOS 15 device you’ve been clinging to, let’s just get things very clear very quickly – the tool in question is only for 32-bit iOS 9 devices.
We’re talking, of course, about Blizzard, the new jailbreak tool from GeoSn0w (@FCE365). This is a semi-untethered jailbreak for 32-bit devices running iOS 9.0-9.3.6, which means it comes as a download. ipa and can be installed using utilities such as Sideloady. Unfortunately, AltStore and AltServer do not support iOS 9.
For those who don’t know, 32-bit devices include the A5, A5X, A6, and A6X chipsets. Devices with these chips include the following:
- iPhone 4S
- iPhone 5
- iPhone 5S
- iPod touch 5th generation
- iPad 2
- iPad 3rd generation
- iPad 4th generation
- iPad mini 1st generation
Blizzard bundles several existing jailbreak tools with iOS 9 support, including Home Depot, kok3shi, openpwnage, Pangu, Phœnix, and p0laris, each with their own unique caveats regarding firmware version support, support for 32-bit or 64-bit devices, semi-tethered or unattached. You can learn more about these cautions by clicking the links in the same paragraph.
The Blizzard jailbreak tool uses the Phœnix exploit and is fully open source on the GeoSn0w GitHub page, which contains the current list of releases along with their respective changelogs. The jailbreak also installs Cydia as the main package management application and installs Dropbear so that users have SSH capabilities without having to install OpenSSH.
Particular attention has been paid to the simplicity of the open source Blizzard jailbreak code. This is because the jailbreak is intended as a working example to attract novice jailbreak developers who may want to learn how to create their own jailbreak tools in the future. The jailbreak also includes a modified bootloader that excludes inactive repositories such as ModMyi.
Blizzard has already updated to version 1.1 at the time of this writing, less than a day after release, with various improvements.
While much of the focus today has been on the development of an iOS and iPadOS 15 jailbreak called Cheyote by the Odyssey team, GeoSn0w says his drive to create Blizzard stems from nostalgia for iOS 9, as that firmware was dominating around the same time. that he started the iDevice Central YouTube channel.
Having said that, while most users are far beyond iOS 9 or the devices it runs on, anyone with supported legacy devices can give Blizzard a try or try to learn how to develop jailbreaks from its source code.