App to jailbreak iOS devices is in the App Store for a month

A Chinese-language app to jailbreak iOS devices has been in the App Store for a month. Within a short time after the first messages came out, Apple has already removed the application.

According to the listing, which can still be found in Google’s cache, the app was released on July 30 and has therefore been live in the App Store for a month. After someone posted on Reddit that the “better Dribbble client” was in fact a jailbreak app with a similar function to the Pangu jailbreak, several US media picked up the topic and the app quickly disappeared.

It has never happened before that a jailbreak application could be installed via the regular App Store. The most accessible jailbreak to date used an exploit in the way iOS 4 handled PDFs, making calling a page in Safari was enough.

It seems to be a variant of the jailbreak of Pangu and is Chinese. According to various posters on Reddit, the jailbreak works properly. The app does not include, as the listing suggests, a Dribbble client. That the app has been approved and has been in the App Store for a month raises questions about Apple’s strict app approval process. It is unknown whether more jailbreak apps or other apps that function differently than the description and screenshots suggest have passed the inspection without noticing.

The jailbreak would work on iOS devices with a 64-bit processor, from the iPhone 5s and newer. It also runs on iOS 9.3.x. Jailbreaks make it possible to install apps that Apple does not approve, including tools that use closed APIs.