In the last year, China has become an increasingly important userbase for the iPhone in general, and Cydia in particular. Almost exactly half of our users are now in China. The iOS jailbreaks for iOS 7.1 and 8.0-8.1 have come from jailbreak teams located in China.

For these reasons, localization to Chinese was one of the driving factors behind our recent efforts to have Cydia localized into many languages by a professional translation company; we launched full Chinese localization for Cydia's first-party pages in June.

However, despite demand for our software in China, users there have not been able to buy paid products from Cydia due to not having an international credit card. Some users have even been driven to "black markets", helping promote credit card fraud :(.

We thereby have been working for quite some time on launching support for Alipay, the leading online payment processor in China. After many delays, this feature was finally launched with a small number of select vendors alongside our iOS 8 Cydia upgrades.

During this last month, we have seen thousands of successful payments made via Alipay! (We have so far received no complaints about our Alipay integration, which is actually somewhat concerning... but as I spent so long on it, maybe not surprising ;P.)

Today, we are allowing all vendors to opt in to this feature. (The reason this feature requires the vendor to opt in is that we still have not fully characterized the delays or payment risk related to Alipay, and so vendors have to accept some flexibility.)

Assuming everything goes well (we receive a few actual bank transfers from Alipay, we get an understanding of the delays involved, and we verify they are "normal"), in another couple months we will make this a standard feature for all products in Cydia.

(Note: only users whose language is set to Chinese will currently see the Pay via Alipay button; this is because Alipay itself has a UI that only renders in Chinese, is only available for people in China, and has a payment flow that is difficult to cancel.)

(Also, we do understand that we do not yet support a China-specific login provider. I evaluated a number of options, including Renren, Weibo, Baidu, and Alipay itself, and eventually came to the extremely painful decision to delay such integration.)