In the morning I told you that one of the most famous developers of solutions jailbreak, comex, currently collaborates with imods to create alternative to Mobile Substrate called Substitute. The hacker wants an open platform for tweak developers to Cydia, being completely opposite to the Mobile Substrate currently offered by the Cydia creator, saurik. Responding to the development announcement Substitute, saurik claims that the team behind imods it is only interested in obtaining profit from its own program, without thinking about the users.
Open source software merely existing does not lead to open platforms, as the priority of the vast majority of users align with short-term interests (for various reasons, some good and some bad) and so they will happily buy into and empower closed platforms in order to get a relatively small amount of functionality, comfort, or glitter (see iOS itself ;P)….I do this because we are fighting a battle against companies—not just companies like Apple, but companies like Rock Your Phone and iMods— who want to see "open" be traded away for "ease of use" or "profitability".
Saurik says that he has been "fighting" with the alternatives for a very long time Cydia which only tries to get money from users without offering good functionality, such as its application. In this idea, he questions his ability to continue the development process of the most popular application for jailbroken iDevices. Before "throwing in the towel", saurik still intends to implement a series of important changes for the Cydia application, but also for the Mobile Substrate plugin.
This push is going to come with some style updates to Cydia's home page, so you will see those changes, and there are a couple payment related things that are "almost done" which will happen in the near future. I also have some changes I was working on to Substrate (a different way of loading and filtering that is finally ready, that will come with an easier-to-use SDK) that will probably be released. We will see if it makes sense for me to continue bothering.
According to saurik, the main page of Cydia is going to be updated in the next period, bringing an improvement in the design and an easier way to discover tweaks and applications. Moreover, he intends to modify the payment system for packages, but also to offer new functions for his Mobile Substrate. In this idea, he claims that he managed to improve the plugin to offer the possibility to develop packages more easily, with better performance.
After the release of these news, saurik will evaluate its current situation and decide whether to continue the development process of Cydia or not. To be honest, this competition is beneficial, but it remains to be seen whether it will bring us better functionality or more headaches.
