Cydia is the cornerstone of all things jailbreak. There’s no denying that. Every year when a new iPhone comes out or a new iOS, we wait with bated breath to see someone post a video or a blog post with that brown icon in the thumbnail telling us that we can jailbreak. Maybe that never changes. Maybe Cydia is so rooted into the jailbreak community that it’s loyal followers will never stray from the beaten path. But, iMods, a brand new jailbreak store, is willing to find out.
It’s not every day we see an alternative to Cydia pop up in the wild. But, iMods has come a very long way and could actually be a first time competitor of Cydia. Cydia is a solid store and I love it, but there could always be improvements made that makes things easier on the end user than they are right now. A lot of “behind the scene” changes do take place and Saurik and his team do a great job of keeping our precious jailbreak store up and running. But, sometimes it’s time to innovate. And what’s better to drive innovation than competition?
Other than talking about what we can add to Cydia, let’s talk about what iMods has to offer. I had a chance to speak with Matin from the iMods team. He provided a lot of useful information and I was able to get my hands on the iMods beta, so here’s what’s in store. The first thing we see is an impressive UI that looks and feels like an app built to fit in with the iOS 8 look. After registering and logging in, you’re presented with a “Featured” page, much like you’d see in the App Store. This is where jailbreak packages will be featured and updated every 2 weeks. In the middle of the page you’ll see 2 tabs that will filter which tweaks are presented. The paint roller for themes/visual tweaks and the gear for everything else.
As you can see in the picture above you’ll also have 3 tabs at the bottom. Starting from the left, you have Featured, Top Charts, and Updates. Top Charts will obviously be showing you the packages that have been recently downloaded the most/rated the highest. You’ll also be able to sort on this page (as you can see at the top) by Top Free, Top Paid, and New Items. You can even tap on the “list” icon in the top left that will provide you with Categories (pictured below) to filter tweaks and make it easier to find what you’re looking for. The Updates will show you updates to your tweaks and allow you to uninstall them directly from this tab.
In the top left and right of the Featured page you also have a profile icon and a search icon. Tap the search icon to search for a specific tweak/package, and tap the profile icon (pictured below) to see your name, your avatar, the number of items installed and the number of items on your wish list. (Yes, you can create wish lists and you can also be gifted tweaks). Of course, you’ll need to add your method of payment, which you can do through the Your Wallet button. And if you’re having any issues, then you can see you can contact the iMods teams through chat, e-mail, or phone.
With iMods, there is only 1 repo. So you no longer will have to add repos for specific tweaks. The tweak developers will submit their tweaks to iMods just as they would to BigBoss in Cydia. Since there is only one repo, iMods will be able mitigate what is submitted to their store, therefore there will be no pirated tweaks/themes/apps in the iMods store. Another extremely useful feature for some users is that the iMods store won’t show you tweaks that aren’t compatible with your iOS. So if you’re on iOS 7, you won’t see iOS 8 tweaks and vice versa. This is a pretty handy tool for a lot of users.
Themes will no longer be applied using Winterboard, they’ll be applied using a new theming tool called Anemone. This theming tool is a massive improvement, in terms of UI, in comparison to Winterboard. As you can see in the screenshot above, you will have your theme bundled into groups, rather than individual segments for each theme, like you see in Winterboard. Just tap on the theme that you’d like to apply, then it will present you with a menu where you can select the different sections of the theme that you want to apply. It looks very intuitive and I think it’s a big step in the right direction for theming.
Of course, this store isn’t polished just yet. So we should expect iMods to looks a little different when it is finally released in the 2nd week of January 2015. In the picture above you can see the difference between the beta and the final product of the Top Charts page. So, while there’s still a few touch ups to be made, you can expect this to be dropping fairly soon.
If you want to check out the complete video walkthrough of iMods, then see below:
Sound off in the comments what you think about iMods. Will you be sticking with Cydia or will you give iMods a chance? I look forward to hearing what you have to say about it all.
