Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the year of 2024, you’ve probably caught wind about all the efforts to bring the palera1n jailbreak to checkm8-vulnerable Apple TV units. This led to official support arriving in late July.
Apple TV owners who wish to jailbreak their Apple-branded set top boxes are in for a bout of good news this Wednesday afternoon, as an all-new Apple TV-centric jailbreak tool dubbed Blackb0x appears to have been released to the public.
Citing the project’s official GitHub page, the Blackb0x jailbreak fills an important niche by setting its sights on older Apple TV models such as second and third-generation units running various versions of tvOS. The support is a little complicated, which is why we’ll be outlining that in more detail below.
About a month ago, Guardian Firewall VPN founder and CEO Will Strafach, a former member of the Chronic Dev Team, shared a particularly exciting announcement in that nitoTV (now going by @freenitoTV on Twitter) had gotten VPN connections working on the Apple TV platform for the very first time; albeit with a jailbreak.
The aforementioned jaw-dropping feat demanded tons of complicated hackery, but after lots of research, development, testing, and refinement, the project, officially dubbed “vpnd,” is now available for jailbreakers who might want to try their hand at configuring a VPN connection on their own Apple TV.
For a company that appears to tout privacy as much as they do, it’s both astounding and questionable as to why Apple doesn’t permit VPN functionality on its Apple TV platform out of the box. Fascinatingly, VPNs can be installed and used on almost every other Apple device aside from the Apple Watch, including the iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and even the Mac.
There’s no question that this silly limitation has brushed some Apple TV users the wrong way. On the other hand, there may be hope for those holding out. In a teaser Tweet shared this Thursday afternoon, Guardian Firewall founder and CEO Will Strafach said that the first VPN (and firewall) for tvOS is in the works and could be released for jailbroken Apple TVs in the future:
The unc0ver Team has released a third public beta of its unc0ver for TV jailbreak tool for the Apple TV 4 and Apple TV 4K this week with a number of critical bug fixes and performance improvements, as well as updated bundled software.
The latest updated beta build was announced late last night via the unc0ver Team’s official Twitter account:
Much of this past week’s news has been all about the newfangled checkra1n jailbreak for certain iOS devices affected by the checkm8 bootrom exploit, but was anyone wondering about the progress on support for Apple TV? If you answered ‘yes’ to that question, then wonder no longer.
It would now seem that an official fork of the checkra1n jailbreak tool dubbed checkra1n tv was soft released as a public beta on the checkra1n team’s official website Wednesday evening. The news was shared first by Apple TV jailbreak mastermind @nitoTV on Twitter:
Earlier today, the Electra Team released version 1.3.6 of the iOS 12-centric Chimera jailbreak with improvements for the Sock Puppet exploit and a fix for random crashes after jailbreaking, and as it would seem, they’ve just now pushed a similar update for the tvOS-centric ChimeraTV jailbreak.
The Electra Team announced ChimeraTV v1.3.6 via Twitter just a few minutes ago:
In this guide we'll take you through jailbreaking with ChimeraTV on tvOS 12. Fire up your 1080p Apple TV 4 on tvOS 12.0-12.2/12.4 or Apple TV 4K on tvOS 12.0-12.2/12.4 and let's get started!
On Wednesday, the Electra Team announced an update to the ElectraTV jailbreak tool for the Apple TV, officially bringing it up to version 1.3.2 to match that of the iOS version of the tool.
In a Tweet shared this morning by the Electra Team, we learn that ElectraTV 1.3.2 now supports tvOS 11.0-11.4.1 thanks to a port shared by @nitoTV and @Jaywalker. Furthermore, the update brings bug fixes and improvements:
A few days ago we wrote about the release of nitoTV, Kevin Bradley's package manager for jailbroken Apple TVs. Today, we'll give you an in-depth look at the interface and functionality, as well as our comments on where it could go in the future.
It's taken a long time to reach a state of readiness, but it looks like it's been worth the wait. As we predicted in our Let's Talk Jailbreak podcast yesterday, a release for the Apple TV was very much on the way. Sure enough, Kevin Bradley, also known as nitoTV, has just released the initial version of his eponymous tool, nitoTV for tvOS.
In a series of tweets published on Friday, Kevin Bradley, also known as nitoTV, mentioned that although nothing is certain quite yet, there are chances that a jailbreak for tvOS 10.1 could be released in the near future. To prepare for the eventuality, nitoTV suggests to either restore or downgrade to tvOS 10.1.
Very little is known so far about that possible tvOS 10.1 jailbreak, but Bradley told iDB that the yalu102 jailbreak from Luca Todesco should be adaptable to tvOS.