Two of the biggest non-Apple App Stores – Cydia and Rock.app – with one common goal: to provide users with the best apps for jailbroken iPhones, iPads and iPod touches have decided to merge for the best interest of the community.
After 18 months in the iOS Jailbreak scene Rock of [Rock Your Phone] has been acquired by SaurikIT (makers of Cydia) and over the next few days we will be moving all products/users/licenses over to Cydia Store.
Today, in a post on Cydia, founder Jay ‘Saurik’ Freeman writes:
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.
While Rock Your Phone CEO/Founder Mario Ciabarra says,
It’s been a fun ride. We set out to change the landscape and I think we were very successful. I think we contributed to attracting more business professionals to the iPhone jailbreak community, and added some great functionality to the platform. The current transaction with Cydia is a great opportunity for us. We’re going to miss some of the excitement, but no reason for anyone to worry. I, personally, will be spending even more time in Intelliborn apps development (both existing and exciting new projects). 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. It was a win-win for both groups and we’re excited about the transition.
Folks at “Rock Your Phone” also had some interesting fun facts to share:
- Number of Developers with apps listed in the Rock Store: 124 (from 19 countries)
- Unique iOS devices that installed Rock: 4.6 million (from 220 countries/territories) – Wow that is a lot of places!
- Registered Rock Users: 2+ million
- Number of App licenses sold: 500,000
- Users of who took the plunge and bought something: 280,000 (from 185 countries)
- Users who said screw it and installed a hacked version instead: 38 billion (please send us $1)
- Total Rock Your Phone Store Sales (March 12th, 2009 – September 2010): $3.3+ million
- Number of Rock Employees (we are using the word employee loosely here but, hey, it is our company): 9
So what this merger means is that Rock.app will soon be closed. In the next 10 days, all of Rock.apps data will be shifted to Cydia Store which includes your backups, purchased apps and of course all the themes/apps which were previously found in Rock.
Many people preferred Rock.app’s user experience over Cydia’s technical thoroughness, but whatever your choice was for the past 18 months, you’ll now have only one App Store for all jailbroken iOS devices: Cydia!
Check out our iPhone Activity Center for all things Apple iPhone. [Thanks to everyone for sending this in. via ModMyi]
You may also like to check out:
- History of Jailbreaking iPhone with Saurik, the Creator of Cydia [Video]
- Jailbreaking and Unlocking is Now Officially Legal in United States
- Turn Wi-Fi iPad into iPad 3G with MyWi App for iPhone
- Enable Wireless Tethering on iOS 4 iPhone with MyWi 4.0
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