Are you trying to 'splain something to me?
The bare-faced fact is, AAPL f-ed up.
Yep. There was a two-week hang-fire before the zero-day went off.
But I highly doubt it was someone searching for root access. Plainly, it was someone who chanced on the thread and realized, WTF‽
Not really. I was just taking the opportunity to share my exploration of the facts I discovered when everyone else is claiming that "obviously Apple has had this exploit for at least two weeks before doing anything about it!" meme. When I went to check if that were actually true, I found, no, it wasn't.
They were building a mountain out of a non-existent molehill from this LAST COMMENT in an obscure thread on a forum among thousands that no one, including Apple if you understood the nature of the forum, had looked at since Chethan177 wrote it more than two weeks ago.
The funny thing is that had Chethan177 reported it to Apple, he likely could have claimed a significant bug bounty worth many thousands of dollars, because Apple is paying good money for such bugs now. . . the more egregious the bug, the more they pay. They have paid up to $1 million for really significant bugs in iOS.