On October 22, news broke that the Switch 2 had been jailbroken for the first time. This meant that it was—kinda—possible to mod and dump games on the machine, which in the past would have opened the floodgates to third-party operating systems being installed and an accessible piracy scene. But not this time. Due to the incredibly complicated nature of the jailbreak, the need for now-delisted sofrware SmileBASIC, and that it was software based rather than hardware, Nintendo has been able to shut it down with its latest firmware update.
In the past, Nintendo’s portable consoles have become enormously popular among homebrew developers and the piracy scene for the ease with which they could be adapted. The Nintendo DS (its most successful console until the Switch, selling 154 million units and just shy of a billion games) had the infamous R4 cart onto which ROMs could be installed, while the original model of the Nintendo Switch (157 million units, 1.6 billion games) could be jailbroken due to a hardware issue that Nintendo couldn’t patch out. These exploits didn’t appear to hinder the consoles’ successes, but Nintendo remains resolute in its fury against such actions.
The OS exploit used in the recent jailbreak has been patched in version 23.5.0.
Dumping and modding games will be impossible again from this point forward, with the exception of some cartridge games (and maybe game updates) that are released in the near future.
— OatmealDome (@OatmealDome) November 10, 2026
This is possible because the issues discovered were software based, rather than something intrinsic to the physical hardware inside the Switch 2, as had been the case for the original model of the Switch 1. There, Nintendo had to change the manufacturing, and there was little that could be done to stop Switch 1 users from taking advantage, so long as they didn’t log in to Nintendo’s online services. Of course, of the tens of millions of people who owned the Switch that could do it, vanishingly few actually did, and software sales broke all of Nintendo’s records.
Eventually the crackers will find a way, because eventually they always do, but in this case it could be many years away.
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