The team behind iMods, an upcoming jailbreak store for iPhone and iPad, has posted an open response to Cydia creator Saurik’s article on “Competition vs. Community” from a few days ago. The response elaborates on how iMods is attempting to capture a different demographic than existing Cydia users, by targeting those that would not normally jailbreak their device.
iMods also stresses that it is not attempting to compete with Cydia, but would rather form a partnership with Saurik. The team is working on an API that will allow iMods purchase data to be accessed by Cydia or any other jailbreak store, adding that it would honor purchases made through Cydia on the iMods store. iMods is also preparing an entirely new substrate in light of Cydia Substrate becoming closed source.
iMods does have a gorgeous user interface, but it is hard not to think this won’t be yet another Cydia alternative like Icy or Rock that evaporates into thin air. We have included the full-length article below if you are interested in giving it a read. As per our recent interview with one of the iMods creators, the store should be available alongside the iOS 8 jailbreak, installable through a separate tool.
Full Response
“Two days ago Mr. Freeman released the article that outlined a discussion about competition vs. community. The premise of his discussion was that he does not care about competition nor does he care about money, but that he is doing this for the “community”. Nonetheless, his article ends in a manner which suggests that if he does face competition, he will exit the scene, something that even we do not want to happen and would clearly be harmful to the community. But we want to bring up several points in regards to some of the things he said.
First, and foremost, no one likes competition. We also do not like competition, let alone competing with a platform that is held dear by millions of people, which is precisely why we chose to target a different demographic of iOS users than those who are accustomed to using Cydia. Many of the features that we have implemented, which are seen as negative qualities of our platform by some Cydia users, are put in place to help add a more safe and user friendly environment for our target audience. Clearly a person who wants to use a beta tweak that is only available through a custom repo would not benefit in using our platform, however, a person who doesn’t want to install anything that could potentially crash their phone or cause severe battery drainage would see a benefit in using our iMods store. We could have easily opted to have the ability to add repos to our app and not get slammed by the community for the lack of this feature, but doing so would have been in direct competition with Mr. Freeman and we did not want to do that. We chose to define our own audience, one that is different than that of Cydia, and build a store for them that targeted their needs. While our community is filled with many bright young people, many people using iOS do not have the time or do not want to learn the ins and outs of Cydia and spend their time on reddit or other jailbreak sites to learn what tweak is trending or is good, what it does, and so forth. Would you not think that targeting this audience would be a logical thing to do? The user base of Cydia is clearly not our target audience and as such we are not by any means trying to compete with it in an iMods vs. Cydia fashion.
The next point that was brought up is that of community. We are all for community and believe that the only reason jailbreaking has gotten this far is because of the great community that we have. Many of the projects are made possible through different people working with one another doing what they like. There is no question that such a product will be much better than a product that was forced out due to competition. Nothing is as beneficial as cooperation. Maybe it is not the best option for the individual parties cooperating, but for the community and the users, it will no doubt be the best. A cooperation between Cydia and iMods could bring the true community to the next level. Just like a tree that nourishes its new branches with the help of the older ones that produce the energy, a healthy community embraces its new members and surely doesn’t cut them off. Having said this, we would like to explain why an iMods-Cydia cooperation would be beneficial. As we mentioned before we are not interested in competing with Cydia, as such, we are creating APIs that will allow purchase data to be accessed by Cydia (or any other store that uses the API). This allows purchases done on our store to be able to be recorded on Cydia’s and likewise we would also honor purchases made on Cydia’s store on our store. If a person has already purchased a tweak on Cydia, would they have to repurchase on the iMods store? We believe not.
In addition to purchases, there are other shared resources all around iOS 8. As Mr. Freeman correctly pointed out, why should a developer spend any time rewriting projects that already exist? In our case, one of the main reasons why we decided to wait to launch with iOS 8 is due to the time it is taking to re-write a substrate. Why do we have to do so? Since Cydia Substrate, which was once an open source project, has now been made closed source. Where is the open source spirit that proclaims sharing? Shared resources is the best choice and there could easily be a mutualistic relationship where iMods offers assistance to Cydia and likewise Cydia offers assistance to iMods. Mr. Freeman explained the time that it takes out of his life to devote himself to our community. If Cydia Substrate was made open source, we would be more than happy to spend our time and resources helping refine and improve upon what has already been made rather than re-writing ours from scratch. But that is not the only project that would be benefited, we would be able to help improve Winterboard along with any other project that would be shared. In the true spirit of community, the end users would benefit greatly. Thus we ask Mr. Freeman to not look at us as competition.
Mr. Freeman, we reach out to you and are offering to not only share our devs in helping improve your projects, but are also willing to share the purchase revenue and have the two sides be partners. As we have explained on numerous occasions, we do not want to be seen as competition. We are clearly targeting a different user demographic, one that Cydia is not doing a good job in targeting. We are asking for your partnership in helping us bring in those specific group of people into our community as well as making the two stores not become something that divides the community but helps improve the community.
We thank you for the time you have spent reading this and would like to spread the message of community. Lets have an iMods-Cydia partnership. Lets spread this message!”
Update: Saurik has posted a lengthy response to this statement.
[via iMods]
