The iPhone jailbreak community is on a roll lately. Not only did the US Library of Congress do the right thing by adding the jailbreaking DMCA exemption, the two major jailbreak application stores – Rock and Cydia – will merge into one. Cydia will acquire Rock, an all Rock applications will be moved into Cydia. There’s also some impressive statistics in here that indicate just how popular jailbreaking really is.
Cydia and Rock – or SaurikIT, LLC and Rock Your Phone, Inc. – have been existing side-by-side for a while now, both with their own advantages and disadvantages. Now, however, after months of talks, the two have come to an agreement in which Cydia will acquire Rock.
The transition will be smooth, and the applications and licenses you bought in Rock will automatically transfer over to Cydia. Under the arrangement, Cydia’s Jay Freeman will continue to work on the framework stuff, while Rock’s Mario Ciabarra will focus on what he loved the most anyway: developing applications.
“A few months ago, Jay and I sat down together and we realized, I enjoyed making apps more (and was better at it), while Jay enjoys providing platform functionality,” Ciabarra recalls, “It was a win-win for both groups and we’re excited about the transition.”
For this occassion, Rock also released some very impressive statistics about how popular the application store really was. Rock has been installed on 4.6 million unique iOS devices from 220 countries/territories. There are more than 2 million registered Rock users who together bought 500000 application licenses. Between March 12, 2009 and September 2010, sales reached a total of more than $3.3 million.
Cydia’s Freeman details why this acquisition makes sense. “Rock ended up wasting a ton of effort reimplementing Cydia, while SaurikIT got dragged into an ‘apps battle’ to compete with the Rock exclusives from Intelliborn,” he explains, “The primary goal of this new world, then, is to put everyone ‘back on task’, with a true collaboration rather than this incessant competition.”
This is great news for the now legal jailbreaking community, and will reduce confusion among newcomers to the scene – of which we’ll probably see a whole lot more now that the cloak of relative secrecy can be discarded.
I don’t have an Iphone (I don’t hate freedom), but I heard that there are app stores that just mirror all the stuff from the offical app store and offer it for free, is that true?
No. The stores do charge for the apps.
The ‘trouble’ is that many people jailbreak so they dont Have to pay for the apps.
This is an other app store, or a frontend to rapidshare, in fact, but it have nothing to do with Cydia/Rock. Those are mostly store for emulators, applications rejected from the app store, using interpreted code or using hidden APIs. The free content is mostly customisation apps, ringtone and artwork.
The other “store” have only one advantages, if an app is not available in your country, like last.fm or Pandora, you can get it from there. Those are free apps anyway and sometime, the services themselves are available, but not the app (like Last.FM in Canada). The rest is just piracy and probably viruses. I prefer to buy my apps, the upgrade is simpler and safer.
Contrary to the other replies you have gotten… There is an application called “Installous” that can be installed through Cydia/Rock that does more or less exactly what you say. It isn’t a complete mirror of the official app store, but it generally does contain the newer and more popular apps (usually about 500 or so). They are all pre-cracked and generally work fine (not always but usually), and they are available at no charge. Not that Im promoting it or anything, but facts are facts.
First, the apps is not available in Cydia/Rock, but using an apt-get repository not included by default. As the Cydia store is open, then adding repositories is as common as in Linux, but Cydia blacklist the repository and show a message asking you to give up, even if the “just go ahead” button is available.
Second, I don’t think this site support such software. I have ommited to say the name of the application for this reason.
I didn’t say it was available, I said it could be installed using cydia/rock, and it can be.
Fine. I don’t see the problem with saying it’s name, but whatever. My reason for posting was to simply answer the question that was asked in an honest fashion, as the previous replies were less than accurate…
it tends to keep the producers in check and curb their nastier tendancies.id take a wait and see approach to how the new beast will behave
What good is it if the EULA prohibits any jailbreaking or other unauthorized use of the product? Seems to me the horse is already out of the barn…
–bornagainpenguin
Luckily, most iPhone owners are not American
.
Because the EULA can not forbid something granted to me by copyright law?
Let’s see what the guys who previously told us that jailbreaking was exclusively done for pirating applications have to comment on this.
*takes a bag of chips*
Edited 2010-09-12 14:01 UTC
A side effect of jailbreaking is always piracy, that is unavoidable. Any extra freedom begats abuses of that freedom–it does not however, mean that the bad outweighs the good.
When the VCR was invented, what did the industry cry? Piracy! Of course. And indeed, VHS piracy was rife, but out of that came THE ENTIRE HOME MOVIE MARKET. Which makes more than the cinemas. If the MPAA had won the case against Sony in the ^aEURTM80s, then the MPAA would be out of pocket to the tune of a few trillion bucks, not least the growth the whole media market has seen (big TVs, sound systems) because of the invention of the home theatre market.
Apple^aEURTMs restrictions are no less as narrowminded as the MPAA in the ^aEURTM80s. What limits they put in place with the iPhone only prevents the market opening and creating new massively bigger revenue pools.
Have you seen the stats for the App store?
The number of apps (250,000)
The number of downloads (currently 18 million app downloads per day)
The amount of money being generated for developers ($1 Billion plus).
All three metrics are continuing to grow strongly.
That looks pretty massive to me.
The App Store success has many components but two that are very important hinge upon the fact that it is curated.
First app developers see much reduced piracy.
Second (really important) app purchasers feel safe buying and installing App store apps.
Neither of these factors are insignificant.
If the App Store had not been invented, if the iOS app market was “open” like the Android market you would see the same phenomena as in the Android market such as poor returns for developers, lots of craplets, poor unstable code, malicious code, pirated contents, privacy invasions and a much slower rate of app development. In short a shitty end user experience.
Apple did not invent anything. The App Store is a software repository with an automatic updating mechanism. This concept is as old as time itself. dpkg was created in 1993, for instance.
Please stop spreading the nonsense that Apple invented the App Store concept. It’s just a package management system; nothing more, nothing less. I was running package management systems on my mobile devices when Apple was still busy with trying not to die.
The enabling technologies may have been there long ago. The app store concept may not be their invention (perhaps in the same way that they did not invent the GUI that made the Mac so successful). But that does not change the fact that Apple’s app store is the first commercially viable implementation of an online app store that targets consumers, and a very successful one at that too.
There’s a world of difference between “successfully implemented for the first time” and “invented”.
Tony Swash does not seem to be making the assertion that Apple invented the idea of app stores, but that their model, which is of Apple’s makings, results in a better return for developers as well better value and user experience for end users. In such a context, his “If the App Store had not been invented…” sentence is semantically acceptable.
Yeah the world was littered with App Stores and everybody was busy using them to download apps to their phones and then – dang – along came Apple and copied other people’s stuff again and made it into a gigantic success. Why do Apple keep doing that? Its really, really irritating.
The same way Sony have an uncanny knack for ruining perfectly good ideas, Apple have a knack for pollishing already founded concepts. Usually in the marketing phase. The mac wasn’t the first computer with a GUI, but they made the idea accessible. The iPod wasn’t the first portable digital audio player, but they made it seem cool rather than functional and geeky. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, though you’d think it was by the way people rave, Apple took existing ideas, tacked on a fairly slick interface (though not the most ergonomic) and marketed it well. The iPad, giant iPod touch, great marketing, but nowhere near the functionality of, say, Toshiba’s tablet notebooks of a few years back.
Apple have probably never done anything new, they just have an expert marketing team. If I had a crazy new idea that just might take off, I’d make a nerdy, functional implementation, then sell it to Apple for some kind of royalty arrangement. As much as I despise their closed policies, I have to admire that marketing power, and the overall finish of their products.
Maybe it would be better stated that Apple decided to strongly market and regulate/control the software repository model of distribution. Thom, please name some of the mobile/small devices you were using package management systems on in the mid/late 90s, and their package management tools.
I ran Linux on PDAs, mostly Debian-based. Do the math.
How about a name or two of the devices you ran package management on PDAs, and the versions of software. Help us less informed and enlightened.
Now that the 3G is 2 years old, most people are up for contract renewal, so I was finally able to pick one up on my terms (no contract, no AT&T) from someone who re-upped to the iPhone 4.0. After jailbreaking and unlocking, the first and only thing to use Cydia for is to download Rock. Cydia is a steaming pile of slowness and frustration. I’d be a lot happier if Rock had gotten Cydia instead of the other way around. Not sure what the plans are – it could range from killing Rock completely to rebranding Rock as Cydia… likely somewhere in between. But if Cydia bought Rock to kill it, this is going to suck for a whole new generation of 3G jailbreakers who were only just getting started.
According to Saurik, Cydia’s main developer:
My experience with Rock agrees with the above. I was using Rock for about 5 months and it messed with my device twice.
The first one was when it crashed in the middle of an essential update and made my phone unusable without a restore (not sure if it’s the same Saurik is talking about).
The second time, it kept writing on a file with no reason indefinitely, even when running on the background. This made my battery last for about 3 hours on idle and made the device overheating. The fix required the user to know how to use SSH/Bash, so less technically inclined people were probably screwed.
Of course I dumped Rock after these and never had a problem with Cydia.
Saurik’s newspost on the issue, you may have seen, explains they’ve decided to go this way because Rock, while faster, apparently used some dangerous shortcuts, which could account for your crashes. I don’t claim to be familiar with the internals of iDevice software, so I don’t know what shortcuts Rock used, or how they were dangerous, but I figure if they’ve agreed on this, then there must be some element of truth to it.
How’d you fix this? I have the same problem.
If it’s the same thing, you have to ssh in your phone, go to /private/var/mobile/Library/RYP/logs and there should be a file called rockapp_YYYY-MM-DD.log. In my case this file was 17gb. Deleting this and doing a hard reset should fix the problem, but I’ve read about people that couldn’t open the device afterwards or that it messed their package list in Cydia.
Here is a forum thread about it. http://modmyi.com/forums/general-iphone-chat/703745-ryp-log-keeps-w…
thanks, i’ll look at this
According to Apple, they invented Videoconferencing too remember? Hahaahaha sure. Funny thing is nobody cares when they say stupid crap like that. They are never held accountable for it.
Except Apple never claimed to “invent” videoconferencing.
Scydia, Rock, Paper.
Edited 2010-09-13 22:49 UTC