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Cydia app store pulls plug on purchases for jailbroken iPhones

The Cydia app store has been the place that those with jailbroken iPhones have flocked to for apps that Apple wouldn't have in its app store, so the end to purchases feels like the beginning of the end of an era.
Written by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, Contributing Writer

Following a security issue that would allow hackers to buy apps using other people's accounts, Cydia app store creator Jay Freeman (who goes by the name of Saurik) has pulled the plug on purchases through the store.

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Writing on Reddit, Freeman had this to say:

"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: 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."

But, as Freeman points out, the writing was already on the wall for paid apps in the Cydia store.

If you are a Cydia use, then fear not, since repositories will continue to be available for download, and the community built around the store will continue.

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It's clear also that this is not a cost issue, since Freeman will continue to shoulder the cost of running the platform.

"...shutting this down doesn't actually mitigate the majority of my costs right now, which involve many terabytes of bandwidth per month continuing to be spent on hosting the archived repositories I took on as my responsibility; I am thankfully currently making enough money from my new job to cover these costs."

In many ways this feels like the beginning of an end.

Back in the day when the Apple App Store was much more restrictive than it is nowadays, Cydia was a place that connected developers with those wanting to do thing with (or to) their iPhones that Apple wouldn't allow (assuming you could jailbreak your iPhone without bricking it). But as Apple's App Store has matured (and Apple has become faster at patching jailbreaking workarounds, which were, in all severe security vulnerabilities) the attraction of jailbreaking and the Cydia store has waned.

Do you still run a jailbroken iPhone, or did you once and have given up? Let me know!

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