The Cydia Store, an app store for jailbroken iOS devices, is shutting down; its creator says it was losing money and he doesn't want to maintain it — After many years of being available to users as a way to fully customize the operating system, the backbone that handles purchases on Cydia. The Cydia app store was once a thriving hub for iPhone and iPad users who wanted more apps and functionality for their devices than Apple would officially allow into its highly regulated App Store.
After many years of being available to users as a way to fully customize the operating system, the backbone that handles purchases on Cydia (which was only available to jailbroken devices) is today shutting down. Saurik, the creator of Cydia, on a Reddit thread Friday evening.
He said that this was a long time in the making as the store was making little to no money. The store recently had a bug that may have put users at risk. 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.
Needless to say, it sounded like the cost for maintaining the Cydia Store was not worth the hassle paired with the fact he no longer wanted to maintain it. For now, purchases on Cydia are currently disabled, meaning users can no longer purchase items directly from the Cydia Store. To be clear, Cydia itself will still be around, however, the backend for payments (on the main repositories) will no longer be in service.
You will still be able to download past purchases and make purchases on third-party repositories. In the grand scheme of things, this will have little effect on the community itself as most developers on the platform have moved away from using the Cydia Store for purchases.
Saurik says that a more formal post is coming next week with further details regarding the future of the Cydia Store. His full statement can be found. Have you jailbroken your device in the past? Are you sad at the thought that the Cydia Store may be going away for good soon?
Let us know in the comments below! Update: This story has been updated to better reflect the changes related to purchases in the Cydia Store.
For years, iOS users who wanted to use their devices without the constraints imposed by Apple have been in order to install software from outside of the Apple App Store ecosystem. Once a device has been jailbroken, users can install unofficial apps from other sources like the jailbreak app store Cydia. Formerly, developers could offer their jailbreak apps either for free or for a fee charged using PayPal on the Cydia store. But now, Cydia will no longer be allowing developers to charge for apps and will be shutting down their payment system. The change was announced by founder of Cydia, Jay “Saurik” Freeman,. He said that he has been planning the shutdown for some time now: “The reality is that I wanted to just shut down the Cydia Store entirely before the end of the year” but that he was spurred onto the decision due to.
![App App](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125617251/582500342.jpg)
Despite what many users might suspect due to Apple’s of users choosing to jailbreak their devices and their propensity for, the shutting down of Cydia’s purchasing option did not have anything to do with the company, according to Saurik. Instead, he said the move was due to the service not being profitable, and sounded frustrated with users accusing him of hoarding money: “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.” This doesn’t mean the immediate end of jailbreaking: iOS users will still be able to jailbreak their devices and use Cydia, which will continue to offer free apps for download at least for now. However, repositories will likely become less well maintained due to the server costs of running them that can no longer be offset by purchases. Saurik says that a more formal post with further details about the past and future of Cydia will be published next week.