14 DAY TRIAL // Responding to accusations brought forth by fellow hackers in the jailbreak community, the development team known as the evad3rs have released an open letter to the public, in an attempt to clarify that the team has made great efforts to prevent the installation of pirated software and malware onto iOS devices.
For those of you who’ve missed the start of this fiasco, the evad3rs are said to have received a whopping 1 million dollars (€730K) to bundle Taig (a Chinese version of Cydia) with Chinese jailbreaks, while Cydia creator Jay Freeman (@saurik) says he had no idea the evad3rs were releasing evasi0n7 this weekend.
Developers selling software through Cydia reportedly didn’t get a heads up to add iOS 7 compatibility, in what seemed like an attempt on behalf of the evad3rs to force users to get apps from Taig, which has been exposed as a service hosting pirated works. Now the evad3rs are defending themselves.
Acknowledging rumors that the team has agreed to bundle a Chinese version of Cydia into evasi0n7, the evad3rs state, “We are deeply troubled by the rumors and speculation surrounding our iOS 7 jailbreak. We would like to present the whole story to you.”
“In the course of developing the iOS 7 jailbreak, we were approached by the company with an offer of partnership in offering Taig bundled with the jailbreak in China.”
“Taig is a Chinese App Store written in Chinese tailored and, we believe, well suited to meet the needs of users for the Chinese market. Users are not locked into Taig. Cydia can also be installed and Taig removed afterwards,” the team clarifies.
Responding to rumors about pirated apps being found in the venue, the evad3rs seem to admit that such cases have been found, but that the situation is already being rectified.
“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.”
“We are happy that it was not overlooked by the community. We’ve been so heads down working on the code that we did’t see this. We are sorry. We will continue to monitor this issue and work to resolve it completely. Taig will be pulled from the jailbreak if it cannot be resolved,” the evad3rs say.
The team also seems to suggest that going with Taig seemed to be the best choice, because “Many App Stores within China, including those run by large corporations, have many issues with pirated software.”