8:00 AM – Evad3rs on Sunday morning released the long-waited iOS 7 jailbreak, named evasi0n7. It’s been months since iOS 7 got released, many jailbreakers have been hoping for a long time that a public jailbreak would be released, but Christmas is a perfect time to release the jailbreak, right? Well, you may want to rethink that. A lot happened yesterday, and I’ll explain it all to you.
First, the jailbreak release caught everyone off guard. It came at a total surprise, but it makes for an awesome Christmas present for those wanting to jailbreak their iDevice on iOS 7. When Evad3rs launched the jailbreak yesterday, it was found that a Chinese app store by the name of “Taig” came packaged with the jailbreak software. This shocked many individuals, rumors started to spread and hate against Evad3rs started to spread. Some were saying that the Evad3rs sold themselves to the Chinese for a large sum of money, others were saying that data collection was the motive behind all of this. Soon after, the team released a public statement which you can read here. It’s worth a read, so go take a look.
Basically, what they said in the statement is that they collaborated closely with a Chinese company that was interested in partnering up with Evad3rs to introduce an app store for Chinese users. Just like how Cydia gets packaged with a jailbreak, that’s how Taig was packaged. Users are not locked to use Taig and can be easily swapped out with Cydia. As far as having any malicious codes go, security experts can easily find them, so the team has nothing to hide. Taig got into a contract with Evad3rs to introduce the app store in the jailbreak. There was an outrage amongst users that the Chinese app store has pirated apps ready for download. The jailbreak team stated several times that they do not support piracy and never will. Mistakes happen, and that’s exactly what happened here. The team informed Taig of what was happened and the pirated apps were immediately removed. Much like how there are repos with in Cydia that have pirated apps, this happened to Taig as well, and this isn’t something to be surprised about. Nothing is perfect, mistakes happen. Evad3rs continued on to say that if Taig continues to be a problem, it will be removed from the jailbreak. Saurik (Jay Freeman), the owner of Cydia has previously already been in talks with the Chinese companies for potential partnerships, so this partnership between evad3rs and Taig should come as no surprise.
Now, you’re wondering why the jailbreak got released so fast, and what so many problems? After much reading and according to our sources, evad3ers were forced to release the jailbreak early, even though Cydia, MobileSubstrate and iOS 7 tweaks in Cydia were not ready. It has been found that Saurik was already working with another group to release a jailbreak ahead of the evad3rs. Not only Saurik, but it seems George Hotz (aka GeoHot) was also working on a iOS 7 jailbreak of his own to release to the public. Other teams were using very important and valuable exploits that evad3ers have been saving to keep ahead of Apple in order to provide future jailbreaks. Other teams taking advantage of the iOS 7 exploits could have potentially damaged future jailbreaks and Evad3ers would have to start from scratch. So they were forced to release the jailbreak earlier than they wanted to.
To address one last issue that many have brought up is that Evad3ers have benefited financially from their Taig partnership. The evad3ers in their statement said that “yes, we have benefited financially from our work.” Now before you think negatively, think about this. The jailbreakers have put countless hours of work into their jailbreak. Months of work gets bundled up into a package, then released to the public to enjoy. Of course you may be thinking that if they needed money, donations is the way to go. That is true, however, building business partnerships and trying to expand is also another option. That’s the route evad3rs decided to take.
So, what now? Here’s what I think. Since Cydia has not been updated for iOS use yet, many popular tweaks don’t work and you will run into issues like boot loops, it’s best to wait until evad3rs release another version of the jailbreak software (above 1.0 release) to address current issues. Yes, you can jailbreak right now, but you will most likely encounter a lot of problems. Don’t forget that iOS 7.1 is right around the corner, so if you jailbreak now and after iOS 7.1 is released, you could run into problems and will not be able to restore pre-iOS 7.1 software. In other words, you won’t be able to jailbreak. Stay on the current iOS 7 software version you’re on and wait for issues to be addressed, then you can happily jailbreak. This will also give developers time to update their tweaks for iOS 7 use.
If you want to download the software to jailbreak your iDevice, you are more than welcome to. Head over to the evasi0n website.
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