Depending on how long you’ve been jailbreaking iPhones and iPads, CoolStar is a name you might remember. The talented developer was behind some of the most popular jailbreak tools for firmware spanning iOS & iPadOS 11 through 14, including Electra, Chimera, Odyssey, and Taurine. CoolStar even attempted to make an iOS & iPadOS 15 jailbreak called Cheyote, but later gave up on the project and left the community.
While we haven’t heard much from CoolStar since then, apart from a couple of unexpected updates to the Taurine jailbreak tool to fix jailbreaking A11 devices on iOS & iPadOS 14.0-14.4 and some regressions, the seasoned developer shared a life update on Monday that will leave a lot of folks feeling nostalgic.
CoolStar appears to have been hired by Apple, an achievement that a lot of jailbreak developers strive for. They didn’t disclose what they will be doing at Apple, but they did say in the official Sileo/Odyssey Team Discord server that they begin the job tomorrow (Tuesday).
As a part of the announcement, CoolStar said that the role will not allow for the continuance of working on jailbreak related projects. As such, CoolStar has removed DRM from several of their jailbreak tweaks and open-sourced the code so that someone else can pick up where they left off.
For examples, see below:
- Ventana (iOS 8 -> 14)
- ClassicFolders 3 (iOS 13 & 14)
- ClassicFolders 2 (iOS 7 -> 12)
- 3DSwitcher 2 (iOS 9 & 10)
- ClassicLockScreen (iOS 7 -> 9)
- Anemone 3 (iOS 11 -> 13)
- Anemone 3 Settings App
- Anemone 3 (Optional Extensions)
- Libhooker
- Libhooker-basebins
CoolStar acknowledges that the decision to open source everything was to do paid customers right, as these jailbreak tweaks would never see updates anymore if someone else didn’t get the chance to work on them. CoolStar did add that an older version of Xcode would be required to work on the tweaks since they were from 2021 at the latest.
It’s also worth noting that some of these tweaks require libhooker, and it’s unknown if they can be adapted to ElleKit, the modern tweak injection method used by the palera1n and Dopamine jailbreaks.
Love them or not, CoolStar has been an important figure in the community and contributed a lot of good to the jailbreaking world we know today. Despite all the controversy and so-called ‘drama’ that always seemed to occur with every jailbreak release, CoolStar still made good on developing and releasing jailbreaks for firmware up to and including iOS & iPadOS 14, and should be recognized for that.
In any case, we would like to congratulate CoolStar for chasing their dream to work for Apple and seizing the opportunity to do so. We hope it amounts to great things not only for CoolStar, but for the Apple community in general.