saurik is the creator of the application Cydia and the founder of the first repo for this application, and although you would think that he controls everything that happens in Cydia, you would be deeply mistaken. Although saurik receives commissions for everything purchased in Cydia, he does not control how the repos look or function. This bothers the creator of the application and says that if he had control over those repos, he would change the way they look and work very much.
In a comment publicat on the reddit website, saurik expresses his frustrations with the way the repos in Cydia work, but claims that he would not like to control everything, the application being made with the idea of giving freedom to developers and users. If you're wondering what exactly displeases saurik, well, the display of ads, the wrong positioning of information elements, the wrong development of the design of the repos, and the inconsistent display of information in those repos.
saurik claims that he and his employees tried to convince the owners of the various Cydia repos to fix these mistakes, but although he is not happy with most of the content in Cydia, he does not really do anything to change anything. The reality is that the Cydia application is just a hub where the various repos are gathered and it does not control the information displayed in the repos, but only displays them and facilitates the installation of tweaks and applications.
Yeah, you know? You have a point: if I was in charge of all the content in Cydia, I'd also make a ton of changes: for starters, I'd remove all the ads… the ads really suck, they are horribly confusing for users, and they sometimes even attempt to hijack the user from their tasks installing packages. Then, I'd go through all of the incorrect spacing and inconsistent messaging that you see on all of the packages, and I'd fix that as well: I cannot describe to you just how angry I am every time I see a repository screw up the 9px margin between boxes on their package depictions.
However, the reality of the situation is that I don't control any of that content. I only have marginally more control over what BigBoss or ModMyi does to their depictions than Firefox has with regards to what reddit puts on their website. Honestly: I hate most of the content you see in Cydia, and myself and the people I've hired here at SaurikIT have spent a ton of time over the years attempting to complain to repositories about bad advertisements, bad wording, or to remove things that is horribly confusing. Sometimes the repositories humor us, but often they don't (sometimes because they don't want to spend the time, sometimes because it is bad for their bottom line, and sometimes simply because they disagree with the reasoning).
Of course, some people think I should have total control, that I could have total control, and that I therefore should just take control by changing Cydia in ways that neuter repositories, or even remove or block third-party content I don't like . On the other hand, some people already seem to believe I'm incompetent, and want me to have less control: they feel that I am some kind of dictator that has managed to get myself into a position of total control over something they could do better at. Obviously, both of these groups can't be right about my status: I'm either in control, or I'm not.
The reality is that I'm actually not in control; I'm not sufficiently in control that the idea of being able to take control is itself laughable: Cydia is a glorified web browser; the reason I am in the position I am is because the repositories (who control all of the content in Cydia and have all of the relationships with all of the developers) tolerate me better than they tolerated the people who came before me. I do what I can to manage this, but it is really hard when I don't have control over any of the infrastructure from which anything is hosted, only have direct relationships with the developers at the top of the pyramid, and do not have any control over what the user sees when they look at a package.
FWIW (and thankfully for my sanity), I can say firmly that I don't want control. The reason I got into this in the first place was that I didn't like Apple being the sole arbiter of content: not because I didn't like Apple (although I didn't), but because I thought the idea of a sole arbiter of all content is itself incorrect. In reality, this is the reason many of us do jailbreaking: none of us felt that anyone should be in total control. Sure, I bet some people in the ecosystem want to have control, but there are enough of us that we can kind of check-and-balance each other (maybe by helping out an underdog long enough to keep one repository from gaining too much of an advantage) to make that not happen.
So, sure: you want to get rid of the ads? So do I. We can form a club "people who don't like ads in Cydia"; hell, we can even join a club "people who don't run ads in Cydia" as, well, neither of us do (I assume you don't, right? ;P). We can even get together a petition, "people who wish that Cydia didn't have ads in it"... I'd totally sign it. (Personally, I think that repositories should probably charge for premium services from developers for things like hosted depictions, A/B tested descriptions, better screenshot browser widget development, etc.. However, they don't want to do that: frankly, I kind of can't blame them; as it currently stands, they owe virtually nothing to anyone, whereas, for example, I've gotten into the crappy position where I spend much of my day being complained at by people: not fun.)
However, the reality is: as long as people concentrate their attacks about how bad the ads are, or over how bad the package descriptions are, or honestly most of their complaints about Cydia at me as opposed to the people actually in control of that content , the result is that there is one person (me) who goes to the repositories constantly whining about things "on behalf of the users" who isn't going to get taken seriously (and honestly, is getting kind of fed up doing it, because of how many people then assign the blame to their representative rather than the powers that be).
