December was a great month for the jailbreak community. Last month, the first ever public iOS 7 untethered jailbreak was released. It was also compatible with all of Apple’s new mobile devices, such as the two new iPhones and the two new iPads. Few other iOS 7 compatible devices also supported the jailbreak. It was only a matter of time before Apple plugged the exploit used by evad3rs developers team to create this jailbreak, and the company might have done that with the latest beta of iOS 7.1, beta 4, which was seeded to developers yesterday.
If that is indeed the case, this would make an iOS 7.1 untethered jailbreak impossible at least for the foreseeable future. Its no secret that developers now have a hard time in finding exploits, since they now have to scour the software for vulnerabilities instead of simply using a hardware based exploit. Well known jailbreak developer iH8sn0w has tweeted that while the code sign bug used by evasi0n iOS 7 jailbreak still exists, Apple seems to have patched the kernel exploit in iOS 7.1 beta 4. Apple is unlikely to reverse the change when iOS 7.1 is publicly released, so if the firmware drops in the next couple of weeks, it would be best if you don’t upgrade to it right away, or else you might lose jailbreak on your device for a long time.