By Jon Fingas, Engadget
For years, people with jailbroken iPhones have turned to the Cydia Store
to download apps that Apple wouldn't allow through its own portal. You
might want to scramble for an alternative if you're one of those users,
however. Service creator Jay Freeman (aka Saurik) has shut down
the Cydia Store citing a combination of costs and security issues. It
"loses [him] money" and, when there were multiple staffers, cost him a
significant chunk of his "sanity." And while Freeman had already planned
to close the store by the end of 2018, he bumped it up a week after
learning of a security hole that let let someone buy apps through your
account if you were logged in and browsing untrusted app repositories.
This
doesn't mean you'll be without your existing apps. Repositories will
still be available to download, Freeman said, even though the necessary
bandwidth represents the "majority of [his] costs" for Cydia.
The
community will carry on -- the whole point of jailbreaking is that
you're not beholden to any one developer or app portal. Nonetheless,
it's easy to see this as symbolic of jailbreaking's decline. The option
to run unsanctioned code was hot in the iPhone's early days, when iOS
had many more limitations and a homebrew app could enable major features
like third-party keyboards. There's simply less pressure to leave the
official boundaries at this point, especially when Apple tends to be
quicker about patching the security flaws that enable jailbreaks in the
first place.
COMMENTS