There are so many ways to jailbreak your 1.1.4 iPhone: Ziphone, iPlus, iLiberty, Independence. Which is the best method? Which is the safest? I’ll try to analyze each of these methods and make some recommendations:
Ziphone
This is the first method that was released. It runs on both OSX and Windows, and it generally works. But be warned many people have had problems with it, and when you do have a problem, you probably cannot recover. Phone brick rate is relatively high using this method. This happens often enough that it now has a term, “You’ve been Ziphone’d”. Not good. In general, I cannot recommend using it. (Note: Zibri has a help channel dedicated for Ziphone assistance, but those that join to ask for help usually get banned).
Unfortunately, it’s impossible to discuss this method without discussing a bit about Zibri, its author. Zibri was a member of the dev team who was against the dev team taking donations. At some point he left the dev team and formed the iPhone elite. He opened his site at iPhone elite. Their motto: “Monetary contributions are not accepted. If you have money you want to donate, please donate it to a good charity.” When 1.1.3 came out, the elite team and dev team remerged and worked together to discover several exploits, but agreed to not release these exploits so that Apple won’t quickly patch them. Zibri left the dev team and released the best exploit himself and put up his site very heavy on taking donations. Unfortunately, the exploit really was not his, and now he’s all about taking in money.
Still, the exploit works. The problem lies within Zibri himself. He is not a SW developer and admits that writing code is not his thing. He has corrected numerous versions due to “typos” as he says. His app Ziphone is able to change the IMEI which is dangerous as well as downgrade the bootloader, which, if the proces fails is currently unfixable. I recommend staying away from Ziphone.
Independence
Independence works well but only runs on OSX. If you have a MAC, this is a good option for you. The software has been around forever, is open source, and is written by Planetbeing who is a well known respectable developer. If you have a MAC, this is a good option for you. The only issue here is that installer may not come as part of the 1.1.4 jailbreak meaning you have to follow manual steps to install it.
iPlus
iPlus is probably the best method out there. iPlus runs on both Windows and OSX and has been written by another reputable developer, Arnaldo Viega (Aviegas). If I have to jailbreak an iPhone, this is the method I would use. In addition to being stable, iPlus supports payload files. It comes with a payload file that adds bsd subsystem, term, installer, and moves fonts to free up plenty of disk space for installing apps. It even provides some app fixes! Fantastic! But you can create your own custom payload files, download payload files for foreign languages, and other things. The possbilities are endless. iPlus is going to get even better because it’s merging with iLiberty. I recommend using iPlus.
One more major advantage for iPlus, because it uses a fake bootloader to unlock, it is totally reversable unlike Ziphone. That means if something goes wrong you can just restore to 1.1.4 and start again and no harm done. This is a huge advantage!
For a tutorial on how to jailbreak and/or unlock your iPhone, see my jailbreak guide in the guides section.
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1. Nicolas March 25th, 2008, 1:57 am
What about iPod touch??
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2. BigBoss March 25th, 2008, 7:17 am
It is unfortunate, but for iPod touch, you may be stuck with ZiPhone. On the bright side, you can’t really do any permanent damage with it because there’s no baseband to downgrade in the touch.
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3. Brendan March 25th, 2008, 4:03 pm
So if I used ZiPhone, and I restore with iTunes (or with Ziphone’s option?)… does that restore the bootloader? Or is my iphone permanently messed up now…
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4. BigBoss March 25th, 2008, 5:29 pm
The Ziphone changes are permanent if it downgraded your bootloader. However, if it worked, you really have nothing to worry about. The problem with Ziphone is that it’s a crap shoot. A lot of the time it does not work and you are left “Ziphoned” with a non-working, unfixable phone.
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5. Rome April 2nd, 2008, 2:17 pm
What is the process to restore my iPhone? I just jailbroke it using Ziphone but after reading your blog I would like to restore it then jailbrake it again using Iplus this time….is that possible or am I too late?
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6. orthopod June 6th, 2008, 3:01 am
Hello BigBoss…
I recently bought an iphone and jailbroke/unlocked it using ziphone 3. Only later did I end up reading much of the problems with ziphone. MY phones working perfectly well right now..
But the wifi mac had been changed!
Is there any way of recovering the wifi mac address that was given by default with the iphone? I dont know that mac address though!
Besides that I had a query bout the BL too.. By using Ziphone as many have mentioned before it downgrades the bootloader to 3.9 from 4.6
I vaguely remember reading that pwnage can change back the bootloader version to 4.6. If that is so Could I later on use iliberty+ to jailbreak the phone.
As you have already mentioned before…if its working fine there is no need to do anything…but I was just curious!
Thanks for the time!
Cheers
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7. the big October 30th, 2008, 10:48 pm
Do any of these jailbreak 2.1 or later?
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8. Mercedes Bryant November 12th, 2008, 6:45 pm
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