Cydia Has Acquired Rock Your iPhone

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Posted September 11, 2010 at 12:57pm by iClarified

Saurik (maker of Cydia) has announced that he has acquired Rock Your iPhone, a rival app for installing jailbroken apps.

The situation is explained by Saurik in a post on Cydia:

The key thing to realize is that Intelliborn, the company that brought you such products as IntelliScreen and MyWi, are the same developers who created Rock Your iPhone.

Unfortunately, due to some early miscommunication, rather than us being in a position where we were cooperating on platforms like Cydia, we ended up spending most of our time competing with each other over the course of the last two years.

This was not good: Rock ended up wasting a ton of effort implementing Cydia, while SaurikIT got dragged into an "apps battle" to compete with the Rock exclusives from Intelliborn.

The primary goal of this new world, then, is to put everyone "back on task", with a true collaboration rather than this incessant competition.

For users who were happy with Rock due to its speediness. Saurik says this was because of some incorrect/dangerous shortcuts which led to the "essential upgrade" that was required for Spirit and then crashed many devices. Now that the apps competition is over, Saurik will be able to concentrate on platform issues full time and hopefully improve performance.

As part of the collaboration, Rock's backup feature is being implemented in Cydia and all previous Rock backups and licenses will be merged into the Cydia database. Comments and ratings also being looked at and Saurik is consulting with the major repos on different implementation ideas.

This announcement should come as welcomed news to jailbreakers who will benefit from being able to get all their apps in one place as well as enjoy the improvements to Cydia.

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Jesse - October 21, 2010 at 7:43pm

Yeah lets all rejoice Cydia has a monopoly now. There is no reason to make the cydia UI faster and I get to look at the fun "Loading Changes" text for longer. Yay

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Johnny H. - September 12, 2010 at 11:17pm

Wow. That was a curve ball I did not expect. It is a good business move on Saurik's part. Personally, I was not fond of Rock, and always stuck with Cydia. From my experiences with the two, I found Cydia to be reliable, and consistent. From read, it seems both parties will continue doing what they like and do best. We will benefit from the result. Can't complain. Cheers!

hasisman - September 12, 2010 at 2:03am

jeee

Gurkha - September 11, 2010 at 5:35pm

This is probably a good thing. I had a few apps I purchased from rock, intelliscreen and a few others, I ended up removing them due to constant conflicts with cydia installed apps

Magic Dave - September 11, 2010 at 3:52pm

Remember that Apple and blessed apps are the competition.

NeHoMaR - September 11, 2010 at 1:41pm

Actually, competition is good; Make developers to work harder to be the number one.

NoGoodNick - September 11, 2010 at 1:30pm

Not sure this will be "welcomed by ALL JailBreakers". It's competition that drives innovation. Without companies tend to just relax and not shake the boat. I'm sure Saurack enjoys not having competition, but we'll see how "good" it is. I mostly used ROCK, only going to Cydia to add sources to the both of them. I'm sad to see it going away. And now that everyone is focused on "secure platforms" (hum, WHERE have I heard THAT term before) I'm assuming there's not going to be as much innovation and rapid development. The fact that he didn't "approve" of the last JB REALLY makes me paranoid.

madcow - September 11, 2010 at 4:44pm

I think you're looking at it all wrong. first, cydia is much better than rock. Yes rock looks to have more polish but that hardly means anything (garbage action movie vs. an intelligent thriller). Apparently it wasn't a good thing to run so smooth as those shortcuts rock took sometimes backfired. If you're going to do something do something right. Competition wasn't cydia vs rock that drove this it was app vs app and to an even greater degree jb app vs apple app. It's the mywi vs pdanet, 3gunrestrictor vs my3g etc. etc. etc. And this will continue and that's where we win.

GooDFella - September 11, 2010 at 1:25pm

Finally someone is thinking straight. less competition more collaboration

hasisman - September 12, 2010 at 2:21am

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