UPDATE: Pangu has announced on Thursday they’re working on it.
“[Reminder] Just 1 day before iOS 8 official release, guess that devices except iPhone 4 can’t be restored with 7.1.2 firmware. If you want to jailbreak please grab the last moment. For iOS 8, we are already on the way,” the team said, according to Cult of Mac.
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An alleged iOS 8 beta jailbreak has been passed by a Reddit user, but it might be fake and contain malware, so one should be cautious. It’s also worth noting that there’s a number of bogus sites out there that try to scam people with fake jailbreaking software
Pangu, the group that released the latest iOS 7.1.2 jailbreak, doesn’t have an update for iOS 8 beta. Neither does evad3rs.
It’s been recommended by some tech sites that one should download iOS 7.1.2--the latest update--before iOS 8 comes out. If one has a previous version of iOS 7 before iOS 7.1.2, they won’t be able to get it when iOS 8 comes out.
According to iPhoneHacks, “Apple will stop signing iOS 7.1.2 immediately after releasing iOS 8 to prevent users from downgrade back to iOS 7.1.2. So you won’t be able to downgrade back to iOS 7.1.2, and jailbreak it using Pangu. You will need to wait for the jailbreak community to release a jailbreak for iOS 8.”
It’s also unclear if Apple will try to patch the exploit used by Pangu for iOS 7.
iOSHacker said in June that hacker BlackGeek said he was able to use the Pangu jailbreak on iOS 8 beta 2, meaning that iOS 8 might be easily hacked when it’s released Wednesday.
It’s not recommended to try that method, however.
“If you are running iOS 8 beta 2 and are thinking of using this jailbreak on your device then think twice, as none of the tweaks will be compatible with iOS 8 and the jailbreak might be unstable on the beta software. The jailbreak if released will only be meant for the developers, as is the iOS 8 beta,” writes iOSHacker.
To put things in perspective, evad3rs released evasi0n7 three months after the iOS 7 jailbreak came out. “In fact, we likely won’t see an iOS 8 jailbreak until closer to the end of the year at the earliest, and that’s because jailbreak developers don’t want Apple to patch up the exploits used for the jailbreak too early. What this means is that if devs were to release the jailbreak to iOS 8 right now, Apple would quickly patch it up before the final version of iOS 8 even releases to the public, and that would be bad news for obvious reasons,” notes Gotta be Mobile.
As Cult of Mac notes in an article in June, when Pangu came out with its iOS 7.1.1 crack, the team appears to have stolen work done by iOS researcher Stefan Esser. “They are just thieves,” Esser said on Twitter at the time.
“But the theft of Esser’s jailbreak techniques might be a bigger deal. It seems abstract at first, but Esser claims that the Pangu jailbreak uses many secret vulnerabilities that he has only shared with other people in a research setting,” it says.
The site adds: “From a practical perspective, though, the fact that these vulnerabilities were used to jailbreak iOS 7.1.1 just months before iOS 8 is released means that Apple will have patched them by the time the next major version of their operating system comes around. Which means that, potentially, an iOS 8 jailbreak could take even longer to find than it usually does. And that’s bad news for everyone.”
