Evad3rs released their evasi0n7 iOS 7 jailbreak without much of a hype yesterday and soon after its release it was revealed that Cydia that came bundled with iOS 7 jailbreak was neither official nor up-to-date and to add to these perils, it was noticed that the jailbreak tool added a Chinese piracy app store that was known to distribute pirated apps if the device’s language was Chinese.
After the release of the jailbreak, Jay Freeman aka Saurik took to Twitter revealing that he hadn’t been notified of the release and that the version of Cydia and the MobileSubstrate that came bundled with the iOS 7 jaibreak weren’t tested.
“So, I got no lead time on evasi0n7, nor was I asked for an official iOS 7 Cydia; I was not given builds, nor was I asked for things to test.” tweeted Freeman.
“In fact, @evad3rs didn’t even try my testing build of Substrate I gave core developers, so they didn’t notice a fundamental incompatibility.” he added in another tweet.
The incompatibility with Cydia may be indirectly seen through the evad3rs warning that notes, “Please always backup your phone before installing new tweaks from Cydia as your iPhone could be stuck in the boot process. The situation will improve as developers will update their software.”
Another major issue was the including of a Chinese Piracy App Store dubbed TaiG that came bundled with evasi0n7. The app store was getting installed on all those devices which had Chinese language as default and is known to host pirated apps. Evad3rs claimed that they had a deal with Taig that they will not be hosting any pirated apps. “In our agreement with Taig, we contractually bind them to not have piracy in their store”, noted evad3rs in an open letter to the jailbreak community.
“We are very upset that despite our agreement and review by their team, piracy was found in the store. It was not acceptable and they have been strenuously working to resolve the problem in good faith, and have removed all instances of it that we have brought to their attention”, evad3rs added.
The team is investigating this and till then has disabled the default installation of the app. “We have decided to remotely disable the default installation of TaiG in China for further investigations on the piracy issue”, tweeted evad3rs member pod2g.
This may seem to be a good move by evad3rs, but the word ‘remotely disable’ is something that doesn’t sit right. “@pod2g Why do you have remote access to jailbroken iOS devices?” asked one of the users. There has been no reply from pod2g on this, but it seems to be a valid question.
If this wasn’t all, there were claims that once the device was jailbroken and the Chinese app store was installed, data was being sent out encrypted and that data contained personal information such as passwords among other things. Pod2g denied such rumours and claimed that no encrypted data was being sent from devices to Chinese servers.
“@shsaxena @hulohalo there’s no encrypted data being sent, but downloaded, the kill switch that we used here. I am tired of rumors…” tweeted pod2g.
Above all these issues lies a pertinent question of profitability in jailbreaking community and the very fact that every jailbreaker wants a fair compensation for the time and energy put in for building a jailbreak. This comes out strongly in the last few lines of letter penned by evad3rs. Here is a reproduction of the same thing.
“Many of you have also wondered why this jailbreak was released without Cydia and MobileSubstrate being updated for iOS 7. After we received the offer from Taig, we informed Saurik, our friend, of our decision to accept the offer. SaurikIT had been in talks with Chinese companies regarding potential partnerships, made a counteroffer. We believe they share our views on how a relationship with companies in China currently utilizing jailbreaking might benefit everyone in the community. Unfortunately, the negotiations did not work out. A few days later, we received information that SaurikIT was working with another group to release a jailbreak ahead of us. We decided to release, knowing that Cydia, MobileSubstrate, and jailbreak tweaks would be updated after a few days, just as it always has in the course of jailbreaking.
Yes, we have benefitted financially from our work, just as many others in the jailbreak community have, including tweak developers, repo owners, etc. Any jailbreak from us will always be free to the users but we believe we have a right to be compensated in an ethical way, just as any other developer.”
