In the early days of the iPhone, Cydia emerged as a rival distribution channel for Apple’s App Store, built specifically for jailbroken smartphones. Now, more than a decade later, Cydia founder Jay “Saurik” Freeman decided to shut down in-app purchases through the Cydia mobile store after he acknowledged an error related to PayPal’s digital token authorization that affected to “very few users” through TechCrunch. Through Cydia, users can purchase mobile software designed to run on a jailbroken iOS device, but the jailbreak community has gotten smaller over the years as Apple’s iOS ecosystem has become more robust and secure.
“The reality is, I just wanted to shut down the Cydia Store completely before the end of the year, and was considering increasing the schedule after receiving the report (for this weekend),” Freeman wrote in a Reddit post published last week. . “This service loses me money and is not something I am passionate about maintaining: it was a critical component of a healthy ecosystem, and for a time it helped fund a small team of people to maintain the ecosystem, but it came at great cost to my health. mentally and led many people to irrationally hate me because of what amounted to a purposeful misunderstanding of how profit versus income works. “
Freeman said shutting down the service doesn’t really help him financially, as he still has to pay to host the archived Cydia repositories – a cost that he says his new job helps him cover. So instead of closing the store entirely, he decided to just disable the checkout mechanism. It seems as if the Cydia project itself might come to an end, but Freeman says he is planning a more “formal” post next week to better explain the PayPal issue and also outline the roadmap for Cydia to move forward.
