PS4 Firmware 13.52 Can Now Be Jailbroken, Unlocking a Whole New Wave of Consoles

The PS4 is almost 13 years old, and this week it somehow became a lot more interesting. While I was dealing with getting hacked and trying to get everything back, the PS4 jailbreak scene quietly dropped one of its biggest developments in years. Firmware 13.52 can now be jailbroken, which means a whole new group of PS4s that were basically locked out are suddenly able to be opened up.

My first instinct was pretty simple. I already have a jailbroken PS4, so why not just update it to firmware 13.52 and test the newest jailbreak myself. Except that would actually be a really bad idea, and the reason why has more to do with how PS4 jailbreaking works in general than with this specific release.

Why I Am Not Updating My Own Jailbroken PS4 to Test 13.52

For years, PS4 jailbreaking has basically been one giant waiting game. If your console happened to be on an exploitable firmware, congratulations. If you updated too far, there was no magic downgrade button, so you just had to sit there and hope research eventually caught up with whatever version your console was running. That line has now moved all the way up to 13.52, which means PS4s that people might have written off as useless for homebrew a week ago suddenly are not useless anymore.

But I want to be really clear about something. If your PS4 is already on an older jailbreak firmware, do not look at 13.52 and assume newer must be better. That is not how this works. Older firmware often has more major exploit options, and there is usually no reason to voluntarily give up a good low firmware just to run the newest version.

I was genuinely considering updating my own console just so I could test 13.52 for this piece. Then I realized I would basically be sacrificing a perfectly good lower firmware console just to make the number on the screen bigger. As I put it to myself, "We're not doing that."

The Real Winners Are PS4s Sitting in Closets, Not Existing Jailbreak Users

If existing jailbreak users should not necessarily update, then who is this jailbreak actually a big deal for. That is where things get more interesting, because the biggest effect of 13.52 is not that people who already have a jailbroken PS4 suddenly get some magical new feature. It is that the number of PS4s that can potentially join in just became much larger.

Think about how many PS4s are sitting in closets right now because somebody bought a PS5. Think about all the cheap used PS4s on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, local classifieds and secondhand stores. A lot of those consoles have been sitting on firmware versions that were simply too new to jailbreak. Every time the exploit range moves forward, another chunk of those consoles suddenly becomes interesting again.

What Jailbreaking Actually Unlocks, Based on the $70 PS4 I Bought

I went down this exact rabbit hole recently when I bought a PS4 for around $70 and jailbroke it, and that completely changed how I look at consoles like this. Once you unlock a PS4, it stops feeling like just an old machine that Sony has moved on from.

You get homebrew applications, system utilities, customization, emulators, game patches and mods that are supported, Linux experimentation, and all kinds of community projects you would not normally have access to. I am not going to run through every single app here since I have already covered that ground in detail elsewhere. The important point is that this hardware suddenly becomes useful in ways it was never originally designed for, and now a whole new range of PS4s has access to that possibility.

New Firmware Support Does Not Mean the Jailbreak Itself Is Better

There is another thing I think people misunderstand when they hear about a new jailbreak. Firmware 13.52 being supported does not necessarily mean the jailbreak itself is suddenly better than everything that came before it. Newer firmware support is valuable because it expands compatibility and lets more consoles in. That does not automatically mean it is more stable, more convenient, or something existing jailbreak users should rush to install.

These exploits can still require you to trigger them again after fully restarting the console, and newer methods can still have failed attempts or instability. So if you are already sitting happily on an older firmware with a major exploit, stay there. But if you have got some random PS4 gathering dust that you thought was updated too far, that is the console I would be checking right now.

Why This Might Matter Even More for People Who Do Not Own a PS4 Anymore

There is one group of people for whom I think this development might be even more interesting, people who do not own a PS4 anymore, because used PS4s are getting ridiculously cheap. I bought mine for around $70, and there are millions of these things out there because people naturally see them as last generation hardware. The PS5 is the current machine, new games are moving on, so people sell their PS4 and assume its useful life is basically over.

Except the whole situation keeps doing the opposite. Every new exploit makes a larger percentage of these cheap consoles more capable. So suddenly the question is not just can I jailbreak my old PS4, it becomes, as I put it, "is buying an old PS4 actually one of the cheapest ways to get a really interesting homebrew console." That is where 13.52 matters more than the firmware number itself, because if you are buying used, the odds that you find a console sitting on an exploitable version just improved considerably. You should still check the firmware before buying anything, but there are simply more potentially useful consoles out there than there were before.

The Simple Version of All of This

If your PS4 is already on a lower jailbreakable firmware, do not update just because 13.52 is newer. "You already won." Leave it alone. If your PS4 is somewhere in the newly supported range up to 13.52, that is where things get exciting, because a console you might have assumed was useless for homebrew suddenly has options. If you are above the current exploitable range, stop blindly updating and wait to see what happens next. And if you are thinking about buying a used PS4, check the firmware before touching that update button.

Honestly, the reason I wanted to talk about this is not just to report another jailbreak release. I think it is remarkable that we are almost 13 years into the life of this console and the PS4 is somehow becoming more interesting. Sony has moved on, most players have moved on, the PS5 has been around for years, and meanwhile the homebrew community keeps finding ways to give these old machines another life. After spending the last week dealing with getting hacked, it genuinely feels good to be talking about consoles again.

If you have got an old PS4 gathering dust, do you think it is worth checking its firmware now, or would you rather wait and see how far this exploit range keeps moving?