Speaking at a cybersecurity conference called Nullcon Goa 2025, Dopamine jailbreak and TrollStore perma-signing utility lead developer Lars Fröder, also more colloquially known around these parts as @opa334dev, took the stage to discuss the state of jailbreaking iPhones and iPads at present time.
In a slide from that conference shared on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) by fellow iOS & iPadOS security researcher @tihmstar early Saturday morning, Fröder addressed the elephant in the room that many of us have been asking for some time: when might we finally see a jailbreak for arm64e devices running iOS & iPadOS 17 and 18?
As a veteran jailbreaker who has been pwning their iPhones for the last 15 years, the last bullet point sends a chill down my spine. Nevertheless, it’s not something that most of us, myself included, didn’t already have a hunch about.
“ETA never,” appeared to be Fröder’s response to the golden question, and it’s not because he gave up on trying to jailbreak the latest iPhones and iPads, but rather it’s the fact that he doesn’t have the resources required to complete a jailbreak at this disposal, otherwise he’d have made one already.
The sentiments echo those shared by prominent jailbreak creator Luca Todesco, who back in October of 2022, said “Apple is finally seriously winning” the fight against jailbreaking in a slide shared at the Hexacon security conference in Paris, France.
The latest jailbreakable firmware at the time of this writing for arm64e devices – the iPhone XS and later, or devices donning an A11 or newer chip inside – is iOS & iPadOS 16.5.1. This firmware version is now nearly two years old, while iOS & iPadOS 16 in general is coming up on three years old.
Apple is expected to unveil iOS & iPadOS 19 this Summer at WWDC 2025.
The other bullet points in the slide go into finer detail about Apple’s efforts to kick jailbreaking while it’s down, starting with the physical use after free bug class, which was used by the Kernel File Descriptor (KFD) exploit, being axed in iOS & iPadOS 17.3. Additionally, root helpers like the one found in TrollStore’s “get root” method became axed in iOS & iPadOS 18.0.
On top of all that, Page Protection Layer (PPL) bypasses like the Operation Triangulation one found by the Kaspersky team that made the Dopamine v2 jailbreak possible aren’t growing on trees, and to make matters worse, Secure Page Table Management (SPTM), an even more complex security mitigation, replaced PPL starting with iOS & iPadOS 17.0.
Apple has severely stacked the cards against independent jailbreak creators, and they only continue to double down with each passing major iteration release. Unfortunately, jailbreak creators haven’t even caught up with iOS & iPadOS 17 yet, even as Apple presses on.
Did you think that was the worst of it? Nope. Public exploits are nearly a thing of the past anymore as Apple has made it exceptionally lucrative for hackers and security researchers to report security and privacy vulnerabilities directly to the company for compensation through its Apple Security Bounty program.
So the cold hard truth is, unless someone magically drops both a working kernel exploit and a SPTM bypass in one fell swoop, we’ll be waiting a long time for an iOS & iPadOS 17 or 18 jailbreak. That’s why if you have a jailbroken iOS or iPadOS 16 or older device, you’re sitting on a gold mine and you should avoid updating it.
Just like Fröder, with his use of a question mark at the end of “never,” we’re skeptically optimistic. While it seems unlikely that the puzzle pieces are ever going to fall into place at this point, there’s always a chance of a miracle, and the community has seen plenty of those ranging from the checkm8 bootrom exploit randomly dropping on a quiet morning to Kaspersky coming in clutch with a PPL bypass when it was strongly needed.
What say you? Let us know in the comments section down below.