I recently inherited my parents’ old iPad 2. It had iOS 9 on it and was barely usable, in part due to how slow it was but mostly because of old SSL certificates and apps stopping support. But I wanted to give it some life because I hate to see a working machine go to waste. So I asked around and got a great answer:
The iPad 2 can be downgraded to iOS 6.1.3 or 8.4.1. Both offer better performance than iOS 9 and have untethered jailbreaks. Once downgraded and jailbroken you can sideload hours and hours worth of games. A lot from that era are IAP-free.
So that’s where my journey began.
Downgrading
Jailbreaking the iPad 2 is fairly easy thanks to iOS CFW Guide(I didn’t even realize I was following the guide for iPad 3, but it worked perfectly nonetheless). Once that is done, you can downgrade using Legacy-iOS-kit which is also pretty straightforward. And that’s it: you have your iPad jailbroken and on the software it was meant to run. iOS 6.1.3 is not as useful as some of the newer versions, but it’s pretty snappy and very aesthetically pleasing.
But what can you do with it?
A lot. You can download iFile and access files on device, something that was not possible on iOS 6. So that basically means you can load and watch any kind of media on the device. You can torrent files if you want with iTransmission (remember when everything started with a lowercase i?). Load up some epubs and pdfs and read them on iBooks. Get f.lux on device to get warm light on screen. Download some old iOS games.
But that’s pretty boring. I wanted to do more with it and was unsatisfied with my big-ass reader. One thing that I didn’t mention is that when you jailbreak, you get root access to the device. That means you can ssh into it (which you do for the downgrade) and use the unix terminal to do whatever you want. So I thought, what if I use this as a tool to learn a bit more about hosting/networking?
Hosting on iPad
My general idea when I began was:
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