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.
Read in full here:
http://odb.ar/blog/2025/09/05/hosting-my-blog-on-an-iPad-2.html