While jailbreak might have been revived, things are definitely different compared to how they used to be. Just a couple of years ago, Cydia (a version of App Store which contained jailbreak tweaks) was essential. For many users it was just as important as the App Store, as it allowed them to customize their phone and adapt it to their needs.
However, things have changed drastically later on. Jailbreaking became a difficult process and developers found it almost impossible to crack recent iOS versions. Even when they managed to do that, Cydia Store wasn’t able to make a comeback as well.
Shutting down the service
Cydia’s founder Jay “Saurik” Freeman explained that he thought about shutting down the service. That’s because Cydia stopped being needed, and this also led to almost no profit. Freeman wrote a Reddit post in which he offered more details:
The reality is that I wanted to just shut down the Cydia Store entirely before the end of the year, and was considering moving the timetable up after receiving the report (to this weekend). This service loses me money and is not something I have any passion to maintain: it was a critical component of a healthy ecosystem, and for a while it helped fund a small staff of people to maintain the ecosystem, but it came at great cost to my sanity and led lots of people to irrationally hate me due to what amounted to a purposeful misunderstanding of how profit vs. revenue works.
However, it appears that Cydia won’t be shut down for now, as this wouldn’t help Freeman, who would still have to pay for hosting archived repositories. Therefore, he decided to close down purchases. This change might mark the end for Cydia.
Henry Lares is still early into his career as tech reporter but has already had his work published in many major publications including Tech Crunch and the Huffington Post. In regards to academics, Henry earned an engineering degree from Apex Technical School. Henry has a passion for emerging technology and covers upcoming products and breakthroughs in science and tech.
