Surprising everyone Evad3rs released the evasi0n 7 tool capable of untethered jailbreaking iOS 7. While everyone in the world downloaded the tool and successfully installed the jailbreak and Cydia on their devices Chinese jailbreak users were left confused. When these users installed the untethered jailbreak using the official evasion 7 tool on their device they unusually got a new store called TaiG (or Taiji, as it is reportedly pronounced) instead of Cydia. Here’s what we have learned about TaiG so far.
Update: We have included the official response from Evad3rs at the end of this article.
Update 2: Evad3rs have remotely disabled the installation of TaiG and they are investigating the piracy issue.
We have decided to remotely disable the default installation of TaiG in China for further investigations on the piracy issue.
— pod2g (@pod2g) December 23, 2013
What is TaiG?
The TaiG as we have learned is an alternate app store that allows iOS users to install pirated apps found in the App Store. There is also an official website for TaiG that boasts in Chinese that iOS 7 prisoners can finally get a jailbreak through Evasi0n tool. TaiG is only offered in Chinese language and to Chinese users.
Why is TaiG bad?
While offering an alternative to Cydia to Chinese users makes sense as a wide majority of them does not understand English language however the fact that that alternative Cydia store offers pirated apps raises a lot of concerns.
TaiG is not installed on all iOS devices jailbroken using evasi0n 7 tool. It is reported that the tool is capable of detecting the dictionary language of the iOS device and if it founds that the user is using Chinese language as the main language it installs the TaiG store. For users who have English or any other language as their first language Cydia is installed normally.
That’s not all. It is widely reported that team Evad3rs, which consists of well respected iOS Hackers took around $1,000,000 to install TaiG as a bundle with Cydia. We have yet to hear the confirmation of this report from Evad3rs.
Can Chinese Users get Cydia at all?
Yes. It is reported that while jailbreaking evasi0n 7 does shows an option to jailbreakers asking if they want to install Cydia. They can simply check the box before jailbreaking.
What does TaiG means for you?
We ourselves are confused about what TaiG means for us and for the Chinese users. But due to the fact that it is offering pirated apps we can easily deduce that its not a good thing. Privacy is another issue since TaiG is bundled with evasi0n 7 even though it does not get installed with the jailbreak on non-Chinese iOS devices, it is still there.
But we will wait until we hear something official from Evad3rs as we have no doubts about their intentions unless proven otherwise.
We will keep you updated with the situation.
Update: Here’s an excerpt from official response published by Evad3rs:
Preventing piracy is also extremely important to us. We are deeply sorry and embarrassed about the piracy that was seen today. All of us have spoken out vehemently against piracy in the past. We don’t believe it’s right for developers to not get paid for their work. In our agreement with Taig, we contractually bind them to not have piracy in their store. This was an extremely important precondition of working with them. In entering the agreement with them, we had hoped and continue to hope that our cooperation with Taig will improve the piracy situation in China. Many App Stores within China, including those run by large corporations, have many issues with pirated software. Promoting an app store that is required not to have piracy with our jailbreak, we believe, will help developers.
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 didn’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.
About taking financial gains in return for adding TaiG as a bundle in evasi0n 7 Evad3rs gave the following response:
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. However, the interests of the community will always be the most important thing to us. When releasing the jailbreak, we pledged all our donations to foundations supporting the interests of the community. We are deeply upset at how we have inadvertently distressed the community and we are focused on fixing it.
We love the jailbreak community and you motivate us to do this work. Having a choice and freeing your device is important.
Source: iDownloadblog
