In the endless game of cat-and-mouse that is iPhone jailbreaking, sometimes the mouse needs to take a break. Not because it’s tired, mind you — but because it doesn’t want to show the cat where it’s hiding its cheese before it gets a chance to eat it.
Early this morning, the iPhone Dev Team (the guys behind the discovery of the vast majority of iPhone jailbreak methods) announced that they won’t be working on a jailbreak for iOS 4.0.2.
Why? Because with iOS 4.0.2, Apple showed that they’re willing to push out updates that do nothing but patch the exploits used for jailbreaking. It’s by all means reasonable, especially in this case; the browser-based (and thus easily forced on unknowing users) exploit patched in 4.0.2 could be used for all sorts of nasty things beyond jailbreaking, so Apple had plenty of reasons to drop everything and patch it up.
For the dev-team to respond with a jailbreak for 4.0.2 (which, again, is featureless outside of the exploit fix) would be to throw perfectly good jailbreak methods to the wind. Apple would patch’em by the time 4.1 rolled out to everyone, and then 4.1 would be that much harder to break into.
As the dev-team puts it: for the time being, at least, “the only winning move is not to play“.