The iOS 7 first ever untethered jailbreak utility, “evasi0n”, was released just a few days back, and has already succeeded in sparking off a firestorm of debate almost comparable to the release of iOS 7 itself.

According to Apple Insider, selecting Chinese as their system language will result in the installation of Taig – an alternative Chinese app store as the default over the de facto Cydia. This had sparked speculations that the folks behind Taig could have paid evad3rs, the hackers who came up with evasi0n, up to a whopping $1 million for its inclusion.

[box]… developers who try to reverse engineer evasi0n to produce a clean jailbreak utility (Without Taig) will face difficulties, as the code has been heavily obfuscated to make this difficult.[/box]

This was further complicated by the discovery of pirated apps being hosted by Taig on its storefront, further tarnishing the reputation of the evad3rs team.In addition, developers who try to reverse engineer evasi0n to produce a clean jailbreak utility (Without Taig) will face difficulties, as the code has been heavily obfuscated to make this difficult.

The evad3rs team has since issued an open letter on their site, admitting that they have benefitted financially. In the letter, they stood by their belief that they should be compensated in an ethical way – similar to how the rest of the jailbreaking community, such as tweak developers or repo owners stand to benefit financially.

For now, the installation of the store has been halted while Taig is working to resolve the current issues on hand. The team says piracy prevention is “extremely important” to them.

I think the situation is more than meets the eye, given how Jailbreaking opens the door to endless possibilities on the device. A Chinese company paying such a high price to bundle an unknown set of code into a formidable jailbreak release that isn’t auditable – could it be the start of a backdoor invasion on the iOS ecosystem on a massive scale? Taig could have simply agreed on the piracy and financial terms but not divulge any ulterior motive to evad3rs at all.

Personally, I do not support piracy and urge readers to always support legitimate app developers. For now, iOS jailbreakers should just hold their horses until the next jailbreak release.