If you’ve been jailbreaking your iOS device for a while, you’ve likely come across developer Coolstar before. They’re the developer behind popular jailbreak names like Electra Jailbreak, Chimera, Odyssey, and Taurine Jailbreak, and tools like Sileo, libhooker, and Anemone.
Coolstar released many tools in the jailbreak community, many completely free over the years. Their Sileo package manager project was a spectacular success and it largely replaced the (now defunct) Cydia package manager.
Over the years, drama reared its ugly head multiple times between Coolstar and other members of the community, but overall I believe Coolstar had great contributions to keeping this community alive. Today, Coolstar made a Tumblr blog post available that detailed their reason for leaving the jailbreak scene for good.
The Cheyote Jailbreak fiasco
About a year ago, Coolstar announced that Cheyote Jailbreak is in the making. This was supposed to be the very first iOS 15.0 – 15.1.1 jailbreak for A12+ devices, which at that time was a great feat. It’s worth noting that at that point iOS 15 hadn’t been jailbroken at all, not even on checkm8-compatible devices, and PaleRa1n was not even planned by then.
Cheyote jailbreak started development thanks to a kernel exploit released for iOS 15.1.1 and below, and Coolstar got pretty far. In the summer of 2022, Coolstar had Cheyote to the point where SSH was working, Terminal was working and you could even install tweaks.
Coolstar made a donations portal available for people who wanted to contribute to the development of Cheyote, and someone donated money for a new M1 Macbook Air which greatly sped up the development progress.
And then the problems began. Coolstar knew from the beginning that tweaks on iOS 15 will be complicated. Not only did the jailbreak need to be rootless due to iOS 15’s ROOT FS sealing, but they also had to convince tweak developers to update their stuff for libhooker which, according to Coolstar, not many wanted to do it.
Months passed by, and with tweak developer support very low, Coolstar got discouraged. The community’s hatred and impatience did not help. After months of harassment on Twitter, and a general lack of will to continue the project, Coolstar refunded the MacBook Air money back to the donor in December of 2022 and decided to step away from Cheyote to focus on porting Windows to various Chromebooks.
Important Odyssey Team Update:@CStar_OW has officially decided to leave the jailbreaking community as of tonight, and a detailed explanation can be found in the blog post at the end of this thread.
— Odyssey Team (@OdysseyTeam_) April 4, 2023
Developer Coolstar officially leaves the jailbreak scene
Fast forward to March of 2023, Coolstar finally came to terms that jailbreaking is just not something they enjoy anymore. They decided to update their main device from iOS 15.1 (used for Cheyote development) to iOS 16.4, knowing there was no way back.
This officially marked the end for Cheyote as now Coolstar doesn’t even have a test device for Cheyote anymore. Today, April 4th, Coolstar officially announced its departure from the jailbreak community.
Going forward, they will be focusing on Chromebooks as they enjoy the Chromebook community much more. The primary reason cited by Coolstar is the general bad attitude of the community, repeated transphobia, and harassment over the years, but also the lack of interest in jailbreaking anymore as they’ve only used to use one tweak nowadays.
So what will happen to Cheyote Jailbreak and Sileo?
Now that Coolstar left, Cheyote Jailbreak is officially canceled. It’s very unlikely Coolstar will ever come back to finish Cheyote so as far as anyone is concerned, this jailbreak project is dead. As for the Sileo package manager, for over a year it has been actively developed and maintained by @elihwyma and will continue to be maintained by them.
For Taurine, Odyssey, and so on, they’ve received their EOL (End Of Life) updates and are now considered no longer maintained, but stable to use.
Final thoughts
It’s certainly a sad day for the jailbreak scene. We’ve lost today a prominent developer who has released numerous jailbreak tools, tweaks, and utilities. The jailbreak community will surely survive without Coolstar, but their departure should make us think seriously about changing our behavior as a community, especially when it comes to things like impatience, developer harassment, and transphobia.
These developers do not owe anybody anything. Most of them do this free of charge and pour hundreds of hours into this hobby which burns them out mentally.
We, as a community, should consider being much more supportive of our developers. Over the past 3-4 years most OG developers left the scene, and there are not a lot of new developers to replace them. Will to develop is a thing, skill to develop is completely another.
Farewell, Coolstar.
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