Need to change google maps source

Hi,

I have a chinese iPhone 4 (4.2.1) - a legit one bought from Apple in Shanghai where I live. What they didn't tell me at the time, was that although you can change the language back to English, as you'd expect, the Maps app is locked to chinese language, which renders it completely useless unless you understand Chinese characters. Even more annoyingly, when outside china, the map continues to display street names and all other text etc in Chinese! The map also shows borders as how China sees them, albeit I couldn't care less about that.

Anyway, I've looked around, and it appears this has been resolved for a number of people where they've successfully edited the following file lib file, albeit based on a 4.1 jailbreak, to change certain bytes, which has resulted in english, rather than chinese characters on all maps:

file: dyld_shared_cache_armv7
location: /System/Library/Caches/com.apple.dyld/

old "www.google.cn"
new "www.google.fr"
00B7E68A: 66 63
00B7E68B: 72 6E

FR (France) was used to maintain filesize, otherwise it might jump. Someone uploaded this new file with the hex changed to FR, but it wouldn't work on my 4.2.1 o/s (not surprisingly - file size was way different).

I've SSH'd the relevant file onto my PC and have searched for the same "www.google.cn" reference in ascii and then changed cn to fr with a hex editor. I've then copied back the file using WinSCP via SSH on my iPhone. Unfortunately the maps app doesn’t open (shudders when it tries to open).

Is there something I’m missing on dragging files back onto the iPhone? Any other thoughts?

And for reference, I can't go back to 4.1 (I upgraded the phone to 4.2.1 before I knew anything about this, or jailbreaking for that matter).

Cheers...

Good suggestion, and not something I'd checked, but they were exactly the same attributes as yours (bar file size - 4.21 is about 143mb), and also same as the previous unhacked file, which I'd left on the phone, but just renamed.

Well if you buy one quickly, you'll get os4.1, which several people on shanghai expat have successfully converted, once jailbroken, to English maps.

Unfortunately haven't made any progress on this myself (os4.2.1)- I've tried everything I can think of and am hoping the person who changed the file under 4.1 will be able to help me.

That said, here in china it's not as annoying as you might think - I had a bunch of bookmarks from my previous 3GS and you can still use the directions to see where you need to get to (4.2.1 even corrects the google offset). I've made a link to google maps webpage as an icon on my springboard and then I can flick between the 2 apps as I need to. Maybe I can live with it in Chinese in china, but am pretty sure it will annoy the hell out of me outside china!

Alternatively, get a hong kong import!

nok123 said:

Any luck with the English version of Google Maps on your Chinese iPhone 4? Wondering if the recent upgrade to 4.3 changed anything ...

Click to expand...

Yeah, all working fine now - as soon as the unteathered Greenpois0n JB came out, the hack that people had used on 4.1 worked fine on 4.21. Now have a chinese iPhone 4, with maps app in English. Also edited a plist file to stop Google defaulting to Google.cn wherever you are in the world - now refers to Google.com.

Have no reason to upgrade to 4.3, but doubt very much it corrects an issue that was intentional for the Chinese iPhone market.

Anyway, all good - phone now behaves same as any non-chinese iPhone!