The realities of running Cydia, the jailbreak app store
How profitable is Cydia, the jailbreak app store, and what happened to the Mac version of Cydia? Jay Freeman (Saurik), the founder of Cydia, recently provided some answers. The explanations were prompted by disgruntled users venting over Cydia's lack of updates and the whereabouts of a Mac version, and ended up as a mini-interview of sorts. In response to claims that Saurik keeps 30% of every app sold in Cydia, like Apple does with the App Store, Saurik provided details on where a large portion of that 30% actually goes. From the ModMyi thread:
The difference between revenue and profit (revenue minus expenses) seems often to get confused, not only with regards to Saurik but Apple as well. Just like Apple's App Store and Android's Google Play, Cydia costs money to run, and a huge amount, if not all of the revenue generated from them go into bandwidth, hosting, transaction costs, and everything else that goes along with running such a large online store.
Saurik also explained -- again -- why the Mac version of Cydia was never released, and what happened with efforts to create a Mac substrate.
Saurik also talked about the Rock acquisition, Winterboard vs Dreamboard, and a few other interesting topics.
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iMore senior editor from 2011 to 2015.