PanGu (not the China’s state-backed search engine) announced an iOS 7.1.1 jailbreak last night (Beijing time) that marks the first iOS jailbreak released by a Chinese team. It comes in Chinese and English. The team behind it is comprised of Chinese hackers Daniel_K4, dm557, windknown and OGC557. Watch the demo on YouTube or Youku.
PanGu is backed by PP Assistant (not official translation) , an app store and tools developer for iOS devices whose parent company was acquired by UCWeb last year. PanGu has been integrated into the jailbreak tool developed by PP Assistant.
As we discussed before, many Chinese tech companies are eyeing iOS app distribution given the sales growth of Apple devices in China market and that the Android app market has been largely occupied by several big Chinese Internet companies such as Qihoo, Baidu, Xiaomi, Wandoujia and Tencent.
UCWeb claims PP Assistant is the biggest iOS app distributor in China, citing a report by Chinese research company iResearch, with 50 million users and 10 million daily app downloads. PP Assistant’s major revenue source, like most Android app distributors in China, is revenue cut from third-party games who take advantage of its app distribution capability. It makes more than RMB50 million (roughly US$8) from gaming monthly, according to UCWeb.
Qihoo, one of the biggest Android app distributors — it claims it’s the largest mobile game distributor in China, has a stake in Kuaiyong, the developer behind the TaiG app store bundled with the Evad3rs iOS 7 jailbreak. It caused quite a fuss last year, for pirated iOS apps were founded and it prevented users to uninstall the store. The TaiG team claimed they’d roll out jailbreaks by themselves, but so far we haven’t heard about any updates.
Other major players in iOS app distribution in China include 91 Wireless, the Android and iOS app distributor acquired by Baidu last year. Baidu also bought App111 who offers services similar to PP Assistant’s in early this year.
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