Well, if you didn’t know it was coming, you should have: it’s been confirmed that the current beta of iOS 6 eliminates the exploits used by pod2g and the rest of the Dev Team to jailbreak iOS 5.1.1. In other words, if you were hoping for a quick jailbreak of iOS 6, you’re probably going to be disappointed.
MuscleNerd, a member of the Dev Team, tweeted earlier this morning that he had managed to get iOS 6 on his A4 iPod Touch jailbroken, but there were numerous problems, including with Cydia:
Here’s ioreg of my tethered-JB ipt4g 6.0: http://t.co/50LBbsGD ..MANY things including Cydia are broken, don’t expect beta JB for a while!
That means that despite the advance work the Dev Team has already done to get ready for iOS 6, we’re probably in for another long wait before there’s a public jailbreak tool available for iOS 6.
It’s worth point out again, though, that this isn’t particularly surprising. As soon as the Dev Team makes a jailbreak public, you can bet that Apple’s own devs are first in line for the download. Once they get it, they pick it apart to see how it works, then they begin changing iOS to compensate. It’s a game of cat-and-mouse that’s been going on for years. The fact that Apple is legally required to tolerate jailbreaking (which the FTC treats as an exception to the DMCA, despite Apple’s best efforts), doesn’t mean that they have to like it, nor that they can’t make the Dev Team’s life as hard as possible.
Of course, some of iOS 6’s new features may mean that some people won’t be as interested in jailbreaking iOS 6. After all, Apple has added many much-requested features this time around, several of which became popular first in Cydia. Those who do want to jailbreak iOS 6, though, should settle in for a long wait.