The iPhone Duo Got Jailbroken on Launch Day

Apple’s first foldable, the iPhone Duo, went on sale on October 23… and it didn’t even last one day 😅

The security research group Calif posted a video on X showing an iPhone Duo on iOS 27.1 with the home screen icons and widgets bouncing all over the place and an anime character on screen. Classic jailbreak stuff, the kind of thing Apple never lets you do.

But before you get excited: there’s no jailbreak you can download. Calif says it won’t release it for normal users.

What did they actually do?

According to the French site iGeneration and the German outlet Heise, where Calif researcher Stefan Esser confirmed the work, the jailbreak chains two security bugs together:

• An SPTM bypass. SPTM is the protection Apple uses to guard the most sensitive parts of the system’s memory. Think of it as the bodyguard of iOS, and they got past him.
• “Airlift”, a sandbox escape. Every app on an iPhone is locked in its own little room (the sandbox) so it can’t touch the rest of the phone. Airlift opens the door.

Put both together and you get a lot of control over the phone. In the demo, a file browser could even reach system folders that are normally locked. Calif hasn’t explained how the very first step of the attack works though, so it’s not a full “click a link and you’re hacked” attack.

This isn’t their first one either: a week earlier they showed a jailbreak of the iPhone 18 Pro on iOS 27.0.1. And just like with the PHP2Shell bugs, Esser says AI helped build it. AI is clearly speeding up security research, for better and for worse.

Jailbreaking then vs now

If you were around in the iPhone 4 days, you remember how easy jailbreaking used to be. Now it’s a completely different world:

Back then you just opened a website in Safari, tapped a button and a minute later you were jailbroken. Then in 2019 came checkm8, a bug in the boot chip (the bootrom) of older iPhones that Apple can’t fix with a software update, which is why those older phones can still be jailbroken with it today. Since then Apple has added layer after layer of protection, like SPTM, and jailbreaks for the newest iPhones are rare, very complex, and usually stay private like this one.

So can I jailbreak my iPhone Duo?

Nope, not right now. Calif says no version for normal users is coming. Esser said they might publish a proof of concept later to explain the bugs, but not as an app to install. The Apple Wiki, which tracks every jailbreak, also lists nothing for the iPhone Duo.

Is my iPhone at risk?

For now, not really. The exploit isn’t public, and Calif says the bugs have been or will be reported to Apple. According to Esser, most of them should be fixed in iOS 27.2. Apple hasn’t said anything yet, so that’s not confirmed.

Still, bugs like these in the wrong hands could let malware reach your messages, photos and saved passwords. So the best thing you can do is easy: install iOS 27.2 as soon as it comes out.

Wait, is jailbreaking even legal?

Jailbreaking your own phone isn’t a crime in most places, but there are some important limits:

• United States: the US Copyright Office has a specific exemption that allows jailbreaking smartphones, for example to install apps from other sources.
• Europe (including Spain): there’s generally no law against modifying a device you own.
• Apple’s rules: Apple says jailbreaking breaks its iOS software license and can cause crashes, security problems and battery drain, and it may refuse to repair an iPhone with unauthorized software on it.
• Piracy is still illegal: using a jailbreak to get paid apps for free is copyright infringement, everywhere.

This is general information, not legal advice. Laws are different in every country and can change.