This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/jailbreak by /u/dleovl on 2024-02-14 13:59:10.
TL;DR, no yappin’, roothide was never meant to be used by the general public, as it only benefits those who require the functionality of roothide. When Dopamine 2 releases, you should use Dopamine 2 and never look back. You should’ve never used roothide in the first place (despite it being all there was, I think you would’ve managed without it). For those who are not supported by Dopamine 2 but still have TrollStore, those who need roothide, or those who don’t understand the purpose of roothide / why roothide was used / why many people say it sucks, read on.
Don’t know what you’re doing? Follow this guide:
Do you need roothide for jailbreak detection purposes?
No -> Wait for Dopamine.
Yes -> Use roothide’s tools.
IDK -> Wait for Dopamine.
assuming Dopamine will work for you :trol:
With that out of the way,
This post is my contribution to providing information + my passive-aggressive take on the state both roothide and Serotonin are in.
roothide is a way to hide the presence of a jailbreak. Think MagiskHide but on iOS.
roothide Dopamine
… was a fork of Dopamine that implemented the tactics of roothide into a proper jailbreak. roothide provided a Manager application that allowed for complete injection blacklisting and varClean, along with some general notes about jailbreak detection in general. This was an amazing piece of software that, while not required, provided an AMAZING solution to jailbreak detection for those who actually needed it. I’ll admit, I’ve seen some pretty nasty applications that put up a massive brick wall and won’t let you use the app if you have a trace of jailbreak related stuff on your phone. Absolutely abysmal.
You’re probably thinking, ‘this is way too damn overkill’. And you’re right. Imagine needing to use an entirely different jailbreak tool to avoid jailbreak detection. Imagine needing to patch your tweaks to roothide. That’s soooooo stupid.
Whatever, we’re past roothide Dopamine, nobody is using roothide Dopamine anymore (sorry 15 gang…). However, roothide itself still lived on. While it was a pain to use, it proved to work wonders, with no jailbreak detection bypass tweak being as globally functional as roothide was.
roothide Bootstrap
… was a tool that worked on top of TrollStore and CoreTrust as a whole to provide a seemingly automated TrollStore experience (albeit for different purposes). Using the roothide Bootstrap allows you to install tweaks through a package manager (Sileo for simplicity’s sake) and enable tweak injection into applications through the App List feature. Seems like a jailbreak, doesn’t it…? At least, that’s the process we’ve been going through for other tools (minus App List of course).
Despite the blatant similarities compared to actual jailbreaks, roothide Bootstrap never implemented support for SpringBoard injection, which understandably turned away a majority of people, as it never provided the same experience as a proper jailbreak like Dopamine.
Serotonin
… came along after a collaboration with hrtowii and Mineek, which you may know from their previous attempts at getting SpringBoard injection working on the roothide Bootstrap. Despite roothide Bootstrap’s limitations, Serotonin provided a simple way to get a more similar experience to a jailbreak, from the perspective of a person who would just want things to work.
I won’t touch on the subject of Serotonin, rather its usage of roothide. Serotonin utilized the roothide Bootstrap, instead of a traditional rootless bootstrap, because it was the only thing available at the time. People were desperate, and wanted a tool that would just make their silly little Cylinder and Atria work. And they got that.
People did not like roothide. People did not like roothide because it utilized an entirely different .deb architecture iphoneos-arm64e, which was different from rootless (iphoneos-arm64), with the most important change being where the jailbreak root was stored. Rootless utilizes /var/jb as a symlink to a preboot directory, and roothide stored $(jbroot) in an application container for jailbreak detection mitigation purposes. This required RootHidePatcher to be used, to patch the tweaks to store files in $(jbroot) instead of /var/jb.
Nobody liked patching tweaks.
I’ve seen countless posts of people trying to convert tweaks that were:
- Simply incompatible with the iOS version they were on
- Utilizing daemons (which Serotonin lacks support for without modification)
- Poorly made to the point where RootHidePatcher could not patch the tweak properly (I’ve seen some pretty horrible pathing ‘DRM’…)
‘Just automate it! Add automatic patching to Sileo, nobody wants to use a patcher!’
While patching automation 100% had the opportunity to be implemented, it would most definitely create some more conflict, as it would make people who don’t understand the full extent of roothide automatically assume every tweak would work. I mean, you don’t expect anything to go wrong when installing rootless tweaks on a rootless jailbreak, do you?
The little quirks and bugs
… that stem from either oversights or simple limitations made both roothide Bootstrap and Serotonin a nightmare for some people (if you worked through it fine, congratulations).
You can patch all the tweaks you want. At the end of the day, roothide Bootstrap still utilizes roothide, which makes it unsuitable for people who don’t actually need roothide for jailbreak detection. Serotonin, the only tool available for arm64e devices, forced everyone into using roothide’s Bootstrap, making everyone believe it was supposed to be up to everyone’s standards.
I’ve seen it all.
Time and time again I’ve seen slander or blatant misinformation being thrown around about roothide, roothide Bootstrap, and Serotonin, either due to not actually knowing the actual purpose it serves or just having a bad experience with them. But seriously, does it mean you should put others down or discourage them from using the tools?
Think about it this way; r/jailbreak is a resource for not only developers, but consumers of the products developers provide. Imagine you know absolutely nothing about jailbreak, your phone is on 16.2, and you notice Dopamine 2 isn’t out yet. You. Want. Something. What is that something? Serotonin. And you know what, you’re happy. Serotonin just works. And that’s all that matters. Sure, you don’t have daemons. Sure, you have a handful of tweaks that don’t work because of simple incompatibilities that stem from roothide.
But does it even matter?
No, it doesn’t.
roothide Bootstrap and Serotonin have been an AWESOME opportunity for both developers and consumers to ready themselves for the release of Dopamine 2, whether it’s cooking up new tweaks, trying out some really cool themes, figuring out how some tweaks work, you name it. That’s not even touching on the amount of NEW PEOPLE that were introduced to jailbreaking, or were reintroduced, from how many versions both roothide Bootstrap and Serotonin supported.
If that isn’t enough for you, maybe you’ll never be satisfied. Just stick with what you know works for you.
Clarification on rootless support
The potential introduction of libroot by opa334 in roothide tools will make rootless tweaks work alongside roothide, allowing users to not have to patch as many tweaks and repository maintainers to not have to include multiple architectures. The introduction of libroot should be utilized by every tweak developer for future-proofing tweak compatibility.
libroot should be utilized instead of the roothide Bootstrap switching to rootless, as at that point switching to rootless is removing roothide entirely and you just have a watered down Dopamine.
Serotonin can be updated to become a standalone tool that uses a rootless bootstrap on iOS versions unsupported by Dopamine 2, though that’s outside the scope of this post.
If you’re a tweak developer or repository maintainer, USE ROOTLESS V2.
Resources:
iOS Guide:
roothide Bootstrap FAQ:
roothide:
roothide Bootstrap:
Serotonin:
*Maybe next time. I’d love to see roothide live on. **Leave the clickbait out, though, you little sussy jailbreak “news” sites.***
You must log in or register to comment.