Overview: Tethered, Semi-tethered & Untethered JailBreak

With the due course of time, the JailBreak has been evolved and transformed into three forms – Tethered, untethered and semi-tethered JailBreak. We can always have a tethered JailBreak (even on iOS 5)  due to the limera1n exploit founded by Geohot which is somehow related to the hardware. On the other hand, semi-tethered JailBreak is a temporary solution until hackers doesn’t come out with an untethered JailBreak. 

To clear the air, I want to discuss all of them one by one. Let’s get started with tethered JailBreak. As I mentioned before, tethered JailBreak is everlasting until an exploit is introduced to break the barrier. What we mean by tethered JailBreak is that after the JailBreak, whenever your device reboots due to any reason, it would get stuck on the Apple logo. To bypass that Apple logo, you would require to connect your JailBroken iPhone, iPod touch or iPad to Mac/Pc, run the tool (boot tethered) and things will get to normal once again.

Semitethered JailBreak is in fact a solution of tethered JailBreak. But this is not a permanent solution. It is useful at the time of emergency when you have no access to a computer or a laptop. Suppose that your device is on a tethered JailBreak. Due to any issues, battery goes down and you have forgot to carry your laptop with you. In this situation, if you have installed a semi-tethered package from cydia, it could help you to get back to the lock screen and use the device once again. However, it has its own limitations.

Untethered JailBreak is a permanent JailBreak and free from any issues. If your device is on an untethered JailBreak, you don’t need to connect to PC/Mac even if the device reboots. Every stock application and installed tweaks from Cydia would work. In other words, untethered JailBreak is the most stable one among all of them. Currently, for the iOS 5 final, only tethered JailBreak is available and search for an exploit is on which would make it untethered. In between the interval, you can try out semitethered JailBreak from BigBoss repository.

Editors Note: Jailbreaking may void your warranty and as always in the past, we would warn of security and performance issues. You would be solely responsible for any harm caused by jailbreaks)

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