Jailbreak enthusiasts have had somewhat of a bittersweet experience with the arrival of Apple’s latest update iOS 5.1. Unfortunately, for iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners, the A5 processor-powered devices had no way to be downgraded to previous firmware. Apple discontinued signing previous versions of the firmware after an upgrade, making it impossible to upload anything but the current software onto your device after a restore.
This hasn’t been a problem for users with older devices, as they have been able to downgrade to previous firmware versions even without Apple signing them, as long as they possess the SHSH blobs relevant for that particular firmware. This isn’t a problem for most Jailbreak fans, as a majority use the TinyUmbrella tool. This captures available SHSH blobs and saves them locally for later use. Although, more often than not, Cydia will capture available blobs automatically and store them on the Cydia App. The downside is, with last year’s release of the iPad 2 in March and iPhone 4S in October we are yet to see a method to downgrade.
Thanks to the iOS developer behind the very popular tools such as Sn0wbreeze, f0recast, iReb, and iFaith, this may be about to change. iH8sn0w, the Canadian-based developer found a way to downgrade his iPad 2 to iOS 5.0.1 from iOS 5.1.
He believes the loophole comes from Apple’s APTicketing system and hopes to be able to use the same loophole on A5X processor-powered devices for firmware downgrades. Nothing has been released at this time, apart from a tweet from iH8sn0w, but for those of you with the relevant SHSH blobs itching to downgrade your firmware, watch this space as we don’t think it will be long before he passes this on to the Jailbreak community.