December of 2018, Cydia creator Jay Freeman has announced his plan to shut down the important jailbreaking companion he provides freely gradually. Fast forward to mid-2019, Cydia is still in use, but Freeman has already indicated there will be no updates to come for the application. So it would be wise to start looking for alternatives.
But before doing that, it would be good to revisit how Freeman, also known as Saurik, came to the decision of nearly walking away from the jailbreaking community. According to Tech Crunch, Saurik has initially removed the purchasing feature of Cydia last December. The dev said the move would lead to an eventual shutdown of the service.
"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," Freeman was reported as saying then, in explaining why he arrived at his decision.
Yet as of April 2019, Cydia is still operational, and Saurik even plans to issue a Substrate update provided he can achieve further stability and anyone can prove the same can be reworked from scratch. These factors absent, Freeman said jailbreak fans can forget about updates from him, which he stressed is not his obligation, per the report from Value Walk.
The dev even added that as far he is concerned, jailbreaking has long declined and should have stopped after the iOS 9 release.
Given these pronouncements, it's about time jailbreak fans look for replacements as it appears that with the current situation of Saurik Cydia could completely disappear anytime. Good thing that Beebom.com came up with a list of alternatives below:
- TweakBox
- Zestia Step
- iNoJB
- Emus4u
- AppEven
- AppValey
- Asterix Installer
Most if not all of the Cydia alternatives listed above have one thing in common - they can be used on iOS devices without the need to jailbreak. But it must be made clear that not one of the apps is the ultimate solution that Cydia is, which is the go-to app for jailbroken iPhones and iPads to access customized apps and tweaks that cannot be found on Apple's App Store.
If indeed Cydia will soon fade out from the scene, the report from Beebom recommended that jailbreak fans can "mix and match a couple of these apps to emulate the same results that you'd achieve with Cydia.
