Pangu 7.1-7.1.x Untether package released on Cydia to fix sandbox issues [Update: Removed]

BY Gautam Prabhu

Published 21 Aug 2014

Pangu Jailbreak

Last week, Pangu team released a new version of the Pangu jailbreak, which included bug fixes for the reboot loop issues for iPhone 4s/iPhone 4, sandbox log issue and other improvements.

It also included afc2, which gave jailbreakers full filesystem access.

[Update: Pangu 7.1-7.1.x Untether v0.3 package has been removed from Cydia. You can check the details at the end of this post]

The Pangu team had promised that they will release a Cydia package for the bug fixes for users who had already jailbroken their device with Pangu.

So as promised, the Pangu team has released a Cydia package called Pangu 7.1-7.1.x Untether v0.3 package on Cydia, which brings minor improvements to the untethered jailbreak such as bug fixes for the sandbox issues. The sandbox issue seems to be resulting in diagnostic reports being generated for some apps (Settings > General > About > Diagnostics & Usage).

Pangu Untether Package

They note that installing the package “does not change whether afc2 is enabled on your device.” I am not sure what exactly it means, but it seems to suggest that the package won’t install the afc2 package. I’ll update the post shortly after I get more information.

To install the update follow these instructions:

  • Launch Cydia
  • Then tap on the Changes tab
  • You should see the update for the Pangu 7.1-7.1.x Untether package under Available Upgrades
  • Tap on it, then tap on Modify
  • Tap on the Upgrade option from the drop down, followed by Confirm.
  • After it has been installed successfully it will prompt you to Reboot Device, tap on it to reboot your device. [Pangu team notes that you don’t need to worry if you notice a green flash while rebooting, that is expected behavior.]

That’s it, you should be on the latest version of the Pangu untethered jailbreak.

In June, the Pangu team had surprised everyone by releasing a jailbreak for iOS 7.1.2 – iOS 7.1 for Windows. They had initially used the exploit discovered by security researcher and hacker i0nic, but later released Pangu 1.1, which  used different exploits.

If you need help jailbreaking your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch with the Pangu jailbreak then you can follow our guide.

As always, let me know how it goes in the comments.

Update:

saurik has removed the Pangu 7.1-7.1.x Untether v0.3 package from Cydia after getting a request from the Pangu team, as they believe there might be an issue that is affecting some users upgrading from previous versions. He has provided the following details on this reddit thread:

I spent a bunch of time talking to someone from Pangu before releasing this (including asking them to reimplement the installation scripts of the package, which I felt had issues). One thing in particular I wanted to verify with them was that this version of the untether did not have any known regressions from previous versions, as I did not want to release something with any regressions as an upgrade.

This is actually an interesting corner case when dealing with upgrades, and is the reason sometimes why a jailbreak might come with a newer version of Cydia, or a newer untether, than you see an upgrade pushed for: if the stuff installed by a jailbreak doesn’t work immediately after it is installed, that’s a different and more reasonable scenario than if you had a setup that was working that suddenly is broken.

Even if only one in a thousand users, or one in tens of thousands of users, are affected by a bug, pushing it out as an upgrade causes a large number of immediate failures, often which are more serious than failures during an installation process (where it is more expected something will go wrong, the user doesn’t have as much data, likely just restored their device, was told to have a backup handy, etc.).

In fact, this is why (apparently) there was no 0.2 release as a package: while there was an interesting fix (the light sensor issue), the new untether covered fewer devices than the previous 0.1 release with the same stability. With the 0.3 release, however, it was thought by Pangu that they had fixed all of these issues, and that the only remaining bugs were ones that had affected all previous releases.

However, Pangu currently believes there might be an issue that is affecting some users upgrading from previous versions, and has asked me to pull their package. It is not entirely clear whether these are real new issues or whether these are simply cases where the user hasn’t rebooted in a long time. (It also needs to be determined whether these are just broken extensions, and are fixable with Volume Up.)

(That’s actually a really common confounder: it could very well be that rebooting is going to cause the user’s device to not boot, because they deleted or corrupted some critical file. People don’t reboot that often, though, so packages that ask users to reboot get tons of actually-unrelated “this made my device no longer boot” issues that were truly caused days or weeks earlier by something entirely different.)

(My current guess, FWIW, is that there is some new issue in the 0.2 and 0.3 releases that was not present in the 0.1 release, and that the people who are having issues are having issues are some subset of the 0.1 people who are now upgrading to 0.3. 0.2 and 0.3 use a different exploit than 0.1 that seems a little more finicky, causing the occasional green screens while booting where it has to retry.)

Thanks retribution1888 for the heads up!