People with jailbroken iPhones need to definitely stop on this one! The jailbroken iPhones have nowhere to download applications from.
Cydia store is has reportedly shut down the purchase mechanism for users.
For Apple users with jailbroken iPhone, who turned to Cydia store for the applications that were restricted for them on App Store, will now have to look for another alternative. The founder of the service announces the demise of the app store for jailbroken iPhones. The store will no longer support purchases as he pulls the plug on the “purchase mechanism.” The plan to shut down purchases was initially a complete wrap-up plan for the store. However, Freeman for now announced to close the purchases by the end of this week.
The Cydia service creator, Jay Freeman, announced in a post that he is going to end the service by the end of this year, completely. The reasons provided by him were more related to the service provider’s balance of revenue. He said he was at a loss with this service and is not actually that passionate about it. However, he acknowledged that the service did maintain a good ecosystem. Despite this, he also pointed out that he was splash unnecessarily hate for this service, which can be somehow a reason behind him shutting it down.
He also added,
“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. (That said, 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.)”
The service provider also threw some light on the latest security breach that led some users to buy an app from someone else’s account if they had it logged in while searching from different untrusted repositories. The service provider said that it was ‘not’ a data leak and requested users to sign out or remove their PayPal information from their Cydia accounts for the time being.
The service provider confessed that it was stupid of him to have made this data breach occur and that he is already on his toes to get the issue sorted. He has shut the store for any further purchases and will be coming up with a more formal post in the coming week.
“I don’t even personally believe in “responsible disclosure”, but I do believe in the importance to avoid confusion; the bug was serious, and affected people actively logged in to Cydia”, he said
Do we see a decline to the jailbreaking after this incident? The decision is still to be made, wait for the next formal announcement. Freeman promised to release a formal statement next week. Until then stay tuned.
Amnah Fawad
Muhammad Nouman Sarwar
