Marking the end of an era, Cydia — the App Store for jailbroken devices — has been shut down. Cydia’s creator Saurik made this announcement on Reddit after a bug was discovered in the platform that may have put user data at risk.

This bug prompted Saurik to clarify the issue and reveal that he has been planning on shutting down Cydia for quite a while now. The founder clarifies that the bug only puts a limited number of users at risk who are logged into Cydia and browse a repository with untrusted content — a scenario which Saurik has strongly advised against right from day one. Plus, he also says that this is not a data leak and he has not lost access to PayPal authorization tokens.

Coming to the harsh reality, Saurik says that he has been looking to shut down Cydia Store before the end of this year. The reports of a data leak have acted as a catalyst to bring the timetable further up. There are multiple reasons as to why he is looking to shut down the service including the fact that he has to pay for the hefty hosting bills from his own pocket.

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.

Saurik has already gone ahead and shut down the ability to buy jailbreak tweaks in Cydia. This means that one can no longer use the Cydia Store to buy jailbreak tweaks on a jailbroken iPhone. On the bright side, Saurik does intend to allow users to download jailbreak tweaks that they have already paid for.

Saurik will also make a more formal announcement about the shutting down of Cydia sometime soon. Do note that this change relates only to Cydia Store and not Cydia the installer which is used to install tweaks on a jailbroken device. The latter will continue to work as usual.

The Electra team is working on Sileo, a Cydia Store replacement, which is due for release soon and it might just be the perfect alternative for Cydia.

The shut down of Cydia App Store definitely marks the end of an era in the jailbreaking scene. It shows that while iPhone users have only grown in number, the interest in jailbreaking is waning due to lack of regular jailbreak tools for new iOS releases.

Turns out, this is not that big of a deal as being made.

@iPeterCao I have seen your article about Cydia and I want to correct some facts:

Cydia didn’t shut down.
Saurik didn’t quit.
Cydia and Substrate development didn’t stop.
Only the purchases for the BigBoss repository were disabled.
This is not a big deal.

— @Pwn20wnd (@Pwn20wnd) December 15, 2018