Substitute it is the first real alternative for the platform Substrate, the one on which most of the tweaks released in recent years work Cydia, the latter being developed by the creator of Cydia. Substitute instead is developed by the well-known hacker developer of solutions jailbreak and former Apple employee, comex, helping to create iMods, an alternative to Cydia. The first step towards launching this alternative was the creation of the Substitute platform, he using his vast experience in programming to develop this framework and launch the first alpha version for it.
- Free software, so you can actually use it somewhere other than iOS or Android, eg by bundling whatever parts of it you need with your app. See below for more on this.
- More sophisticated, partially automatically generated disassemblers, which handle a larger portion of the space of possible PC-relative instructions that might be found in a patch target function – though I'm not sure how likely this is to help in practice.*
- Identifies if a function is too short to patch.
- An extra disassembly step goes through the rest of the function to optimistically identify jumps back to the patched region, which are possible in rare cases; these can't currently be fixed up, but an appropriate error code is returned.
- API returns error codes.
- Some more functionality – interposing…
- cross-platform support will be high priority soon(tm)
Substitute it can be used for both iOS and Android, but the problem is that at the moment it is not ready to be used on a large scale, still needing a lot of preparation. In this idea, comex announces to its fans that all those interested in testing Substitute must be prepared to encounter a lot of problems, so only those who really know what they are doing should test the platform. comex published the alpha version of Substitute and any interested person can test it or even modify and improve it, and at the moment it is not known when it will be available at least in beta version.
