I think everyone figured out this was the case anyway, but based on Sileo deciding to end support for XinaA15, we’re going to clarify that Zebra is no longer planning to support it.

We’re extremely grateful for Xina’s work, and the semi-rootless nature of XinaA15 helped start pushing tweak developers onto the road to “proper” rootless. Sadly, to trick rootful binaries into working rootlessly involves a bunch of hacks, and trying to make that work with every package was always going to be a challenge. There were quite some difficulties working around the weird edge cases, even in the latest version of XinaA15, after many of us worked with Xina to get bugs fixed.

One of the most broken components was APT/dpkg, which weren’t correctly compiled for semi-rootless. It was @anamy@tech.lgbt’s incredible work that allowed XinaA15 to have a working package manager at all, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Now, we have palera1n and Fugu15 Max taking us to the next stage of rootless jailbreaks, so this is the extremely rare time that it seems right to stop supporting a specific jailbreak.

“Proper” rootless is a pain in the butt, we know. Not everything is updated yet, we know. But it’s worth the trouble for a healthier package ecosystem.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk. Zebra 1.1.31 bugfix update coming shortly by the way.