Jay Freeman to start Jailbreak for Mac Appstore


When it comes to jailbreaking, there's probably no name as familiar to the development community than that of Jay "saurik" Freeman. Jay is the brain behind the Cydia App Store, and this morning he gave the attendees of 360|MacDev an overview of his upcoming jailbreak store for Mac OS X, cycript, and Cydia Substrate.

Currently, Cydia Installer has been used by about 10% of all iPhone users, or about 10 million devices. There are well over 30,000 packages available for iOS, and a lot of open source material can be downloaded from Cydia. He refers to Cydia as a store for things that are not apps, but extensions of what iOS devices can do.

Freeman felt that the same type of store would be useful for Mac OS X devices; the result is a Mac Cydia, which will be available "within weeks." With today's news that the Mac App Store will not support in-app purchases, something that is critical to the freemium app model that is so successful in the iOS world, a Mac Cydia might be just the web store for a number of Mac developers.

Before discussing the Mac Cydia, however, Freeman spent quite a while taking Apple to task for their horrible developer documentation and for the restrictions that are common in the Apple development world. He foresees many of Apple's restrictions moving to the Mac App Store.

Developers who are interested in getting their products into Mac Cydia were told to contact an employee at patrick at saurikit.com for further details.

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