Cydia seems to be getting near its final days.
Cydia appeared in the early days of iPhones, and it was a rival distribution channel to Apple’s App Store.it was specifically built for jailbroken smartphones.
More than ten years have passed since then, and Cydia founder Jay Saurik Freeman has eventually decided to shut down in-app purchasing via the Cydia mobile store after he found out about a bug related to PayPal digital token authorization that affected “very few users,” via TechCrunch.
Cydia offered mobile software for jailbroken iOS devices
Using the store, users were able to purchase mobile software that was designed to run on jailbroken iOS devices.
But it seems that the jailbreaking community got smaller over the years, and Apple’s iOS ecosystem became more powerful and with enhanced security.
“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),” Freeman wrote in a Reddit post published late last week.
“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.”
Disabling the purchasing mechanism instead of shutting down the store
Freeman also made sure to highlight the fact that shutting down this service will not be of any help financially speaking because he still has to pay for hosting the archived Cydia repositories.
This is why instead of shutting down the store entirely for the moment, he only decided to disable to purchasing mechanism.
Anyway, the Verge notes that Cydia may be close to its end. Freeman is currently planning a more official and formal reports to explain better what happened with the PayPal issue and also talk about the roadmap for Cydia.
After finishing Theatrical Journalism at the Faculty of Theatre and Television in Cluj-Napoca, Rada reviewed movies, books, theatre pieces and she also wrote articles from the IT niche as a content editor for software producers. At the moment, she is working with various online advertising firms.
