Cydia is the alternative version of Apple’s App Store and it is designed for jailbroken iPhones. The service has been developed by Jay “Saurik” Freeman and it has been available for more than a decade. Unfortunately, a recent Reddit post made by Saurik has revealed that Cydia’s days are numbered. Saurik announced that Cydia is no longer going to support in-app purchases and that he wishes to completely shut down Cydia by the end of the year.
Cydia is Fading Away
“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),” said Saurik. The developer is talking about a PayPal bug that affected a limited number of users who purchased apps via Cydia.
“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,” added Saurik.
The Days of Jailbroken iPhones are Coming to an End
Sadly, it looks like Saurik doesn’t have any interest in keeping Cydia running for the months to come. This is bad news for people who enjoy jailbreaking their iPhones and getting access to apps and services that Apple doesn’t offer.
On the other hand, it’s easy to understand why Saurik doesn’t want to keep Cydia running. The service doesn’t generate him any revenue and he needs to host the archived Cydia repositories from his own pocket. In addition, Saurik said that he will make a new blog post next week where he talks about the PayPal bug.
