Jailbreak users were surprised to learn that the Cydia Store will no longer offer paid apps and tweaks. Cydia creator Jay ‘’ Saurik’’ Freeman decided to remove PayPal integration and justified the decision in a post on the official Reddit forums.
The main argument for the decision is that the cost to keep the functionality was bigger than the revenue generated from the items that were purchased. The introduction of PayPal integration also created a lot of friction within the community as some users argued that all tweaks and apps for jailbreak devices should be free in the first place.
The announcement will affect developers that relied on paying users for extra money. Saurik noted that the service was successful at first and all the revenue collected was used in order to maintain the servers that host the repositories offered by Cydia.
The Cydia app will remain available for the foreseeable future but some repositories may close since the cost to maintain them is too high in comparison to their popularity.
On the bright side, it appears that there are still chances for the release of a jailbreak iOS 12.1 version. A developer claims that he has managed to successfully jailbreak an iPhone XS Max, managing to defeat the numerous security checks placed by Apple within the software.
It remains to be seen if the developer will release the jailbreak for free or sell it to interested third-party groups. After all, he may want to receive a reward for his efforts. The release of a new jailbreak version would breathe fresh life into a bleeding community as jailbreak users are missing many of the features introduced with the latest version of iOS.
There is also hope that a public jailbreak build will be released by another developer later in the future as he is now focusing on removing the security restrictions that block the installation of jailbreak iOS.
The future looks bright for jailbreak lovers.
