A powerful new tool called Cydia Impactor from Saurik now allows users to "unjailbreak" their iOS devices, restoring them to their stock configuration.
Apple's "walled garden" approach has received plenty of criticism over the years, as many consumers would like to customize their devices more. For this reason, many iPhone users choose to jailbreak their device instead of sticking to the stock iOS version.
Jailbreaking an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch, however, does have its implications, and those who go down this path do so on their own expense. Selling a jailbroken iPhone may turn out to be more difficult, for instance, so a way to revert the jailbreak would come in handy.
That's precisely what the new Cydia Impactor tool aims to do: revert the jailbreak and make your iOS device the way it was when you first turned it on.
Cydya Impactor will destroy all data on your iOS device, revert all the changes made to the device's files, remove the jailbreak and restore the device to stock iOS. The Impactor will preserve your iOS version, but because it destroys all data and reverts all file changes, users might want to back up their data before unjailbreaking their device. Any data that is not included in a backup will be lost.
As with any process of this kind, before proceeding users should make sure they have plenty of battery life left in their device, so everything goes smoothly and without interruptions. A reliable Internet connection is also crucial to the process.
Cydia Impactor will take several minutes to do its thing, during which it will show "lots of text." It's important to avoid using the device during this process.
Once it's done, your iOS device will reboot and act like it did when you turned it on for the first time, when it had stock iOS on board. This also means that re-activating the device will be necessary. Cydia Impactor is currently in beta and works only with iOS 8.3 and the latest iOS 8.4.
Head over to the Cydia Impactor website to learn more about the process and to see some screenshots of how it will unfold. Interested users can download Cydia Impactor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
If, for any reason, you later decide that unjailbreaking your iOS device was not such a great idea after all and you want to jailbreak it again, simply use a jailbreaking tool to do it.
