As the saying goes in the jailbreak world, “Sunday is funday.” Well, that’s assuming you don’t run into the many bugs that people have been reporting with this seemingly rushed iOS 7 untethered jailbreak. There’s also a bit of drama involved this time around, and seeing how the jailbreak community has been going downhill for quite some time, it was somewhat to be expected. Update: see the update below.
The jailbreak itself comes courtesy of @evad3rs, as did the last major iOS 6 jailbreak last year. You can download it right now from http://evasi0n.com/ for Windows and Mac OS X. It’ll work for all devices that can run iOS 7 through iOS 7.0.4, and even iOS 7 beta 1/2 if you know what you’re doing. It’s identical to the way that previous jailbreaks worked. You download the application to your computer, run it, follow the directions, and within 5 minutes, you’re done.
If you only cared about the raw jailbreak itself, then you can stop reading this. If you want to know a little bit about the drama surrounding this release, then keep reading.
First, Jay Freeman, aka @saurik, the man behind Cydia, claims that he was never made aware of this jailbreak, and thus never offered an official, fixed version of Cydia and some essential tweaks that jailbreaks install. Instead, the Cydia that people are seeing after they jailbreak is an unofficial version, with many things reportedly not working. MobileSubstrate, the key process to making most jailbreak tweaks function, might not work as well, where some people’s tweaks disappear after a reboot, and will need to be reinstalled, I guess like a semi-semi-tethered jailbreak. Freeman says that fixes will need to be done on the jailbreak side first before his Cydia (and other) fixes can be pushed out.
What’s worse is that Freeman says that there was never a working, tethered version of the jailbreak, so key developers of tweaks and other things were never able to actually try their packages before the jailbreak was released. Because of this, there aren’t a lot of iOS 7-compatible tweaks available, and it’ll probably be during the next couple of weeks when we’ll actually see them.
Next comes the @evad3rs themselves. It’s said that they sold themselves out to a Chinese pirated app market and some others. Another indication of this comes from the fact that the jailbreak itself seemed rushed with very little testing. According to a thread on reddit, users on Chinese computers, after running the jailbreak, will have a number of Chinese Cydia sources installed, as well as a new app on their homescreen, called Taiji. Taiji, from what I understand, is a Chinese app store that’s filled with pirated applications. Of course many pirates would praise that and would probably change their computer’s region settings to Chinese just to get their cracked apps a little easier, unfortunately. Some are saying that the jailbreak devs were paid between $100,000 and $1,000,000 to include this within the jailbreak. If you click the English link on their website, it redirects you to the evasi0n homepage. It’ll be interesting to hear what the @evad3rs have to say about this.
Some are also saying that they didn’t want to keep @saurik updated about the jailbreak because they know he would never let them include some Chinese pirated app store with the jailbreak.
Another reason for the “rushed” jailbreak could be regarding a bounty over on https://isios7jailbrokenyet.com/. At this moment, it’s up to $10,502. That’s a fair bit of money, something that people could probably enjoy using. I imagine that the donations that they would’ve received from a normal jailbreak would be higher than that. I don’t believe as much in this theory as the prior one.
So, what say you about all of this? In the end, we do have the jailbreak that we’ve been waiting three months for that, for the most part, works, so that’s something to be thankful for. But all of this other stuff? It seems to make you really wonder who’s going to be trusted. As mentioned in the beginning, the jailbreak community has been declining quite a bit in recent years, due to the length of time between jailbreaks, the greedy developers, the odd community, etc.
Update: It’s been said that geohot was working on his own jailbreak at a much cheaper price (whatever that means), further pushing the evad3rs to rush-release their own.