Dear Jailbreak Community

One example: they carefully avoid denying the presence of malware in their jailbreak. Instead,

"We are saddened by the accusations that we would ever do such a thing, or sell weaponized exploits. If anyone ever attempted to include malware in a jailbreak, we are confident that the many security experts combing through jailbreak software would find it."

The explanations about Saurik and piracy in their Chinese pals' app store comes off as similarly evasive.

They put a giant, user-facing blob payload into their jailbreak with no transparency about how it got there or what it is. Reading between the lines they were paid for it, but they don't even manage to come out and say that outright in this "letter."

There's always some level of faith involved in installing an early iOS jailbreak, because exploits often aren't documented or open-sourced until long after their release (for a variety of reasons - vanity, ripoffs, weaponization, etc.). But at least most of the jailbreaks released in the past have been transparent and configurable.

In the Dev Team jailbreaks, all userland packages were optional and if a user wanted, they could uncheck the "Install Cydia" box in the payload configuration, configure their own Cydia (because the source is open, imagine that!), or install a completely different set of user-land applications. Plus a variety of parties with various interests in the development community were given previous jailbreaks early, which provides at least a cursory level of auditing and sign-off. This evad3rs release offers none of these reassurances.

I certainly wouldn't call any iOS jailbreak "trustworthy" in the truest sense but this one is definitely the worst so far.

* They don't want the exploit "stolen" or reused by another party (for good or evil)

* They don't want to make it too easy for Apple to patch it.