Since Apple introduced iOS 8 on Monday, and released a beta version to developers, one of the top questions we’ve been asked here at iDB is: can it be jailbroken? As it stands now, there is no jailbreak for the current iOS 7.1.1 firmware.

At the time of this writing, I hadn’t heard of anyone successfully jailbreaking their device on iOS 8, but early efforts do sound promising. Well-known hacker i0n1c says that the first beta ‘doesn’t fix anything,’ and should be jailbreakable…

Here’s the series of tweets:

Download finished. Initial tests show that iOS 8 beta does not fix anything. Dumped kernel fine, but code changed and patches are not found. — Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) June 2, 2014

I guess tomorrow I need a few hours in the office to fix the code and then the JB should be iOS 8 beta compatible. — Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) June 2, 2014

Only question is if Cydia runs at all in iOS 8. — Stefan Esser (@i0n1c) June 2, 2014

Obviously, those of us who have been around the jailbreak community for a while know that i0n1c will likely never release a public jailbreak. But it does give us hope that equally smart guys like those on the evad3rs will see similar success.

Also worth noting is that this is just the first of what will likely be many beta releases, and we doubt we will see any kind of jailbreak tool for iOS 8 until after the public launch. This way, Apple won’t be able to patch anything beforehand.

We’ll keep you updated on the status of the iOS 8 jailbreak as it changes.

Edit: An earlier version of this post said that “i0n1c will likely never release any of his work.” We were of course talking about releasing a public jailbreak, not necessarily related work such as papers, etc… Because i0n1c is so sensitive, we thought it would be the right thing to do to clarify this part in order to make him feel just a little bit better.