New App Stores for iPhone Jailbreakers Coming Soon

There will soon be two new app stores available to iPhone jailbreakers, it’s being reported. In addition to the Cydia app store, the default home to jailbreak applications for Apple mobile devices, it looks like the once-popular Icy store will also be making a comeback. The other new store is called Lima, and this one will be a browser-based alternative to Cydia, as opposed to a downloadable application.

Sponsor

Why Jailbreak?

Jailbreaking, for the uninitiated, is the act of hacking your iPhone (or iPod Touch, iPad or Apple TV) in order to run unapproved third-party applications. While some associate jailbreaking with piracy, the truth is that many jailbreakers, like those who root their Android phones, simply do so to gain total control over their devices. Jailbreaking allows you to install and use far more customizations on your device than currently allowed by Apple, including the installation of themes, skins and even widgets. You can also install the unapproved third-party applications which are not allowed in the iTunes App Store. Some popular ones involve adding new features to core apps, or giving you the ability to use your iPhone as a Wi-Fi hotspot without having to sign up for a hotspot plan with your carrier.

These applications, themes, skins, widgets and other tweaks, are, for the most part, housed in Cydia, an app store for the jailbreaking set. Cydia merged with the another popular jailbreaking outlet called RockYourPhone last fall, effectively becoming the de facto home to jailbreakers.

But now, Icy is making a comeback. Those who have been jailbreaking their iPhones (and other devices) for some time will remember Icy from the OS 3.x days. Back then, its main selling point was the speedier user interface and faster load times. The new Icy installer, maintained by the Infini-Dev team, is still supposed to be faster than Cydia – up to five times faster, the developers claim.

For those interested, Icy is available for jailbreakers from the repos maintained at: repocydia.myrepospace.com/Polarbear and repo.ispazio.net.

Also from the same dev team is a new, browser-based installer called Lima/fr0st. This will be a fully browser-based installer, where all an end user will have to do is visit a website using the Safari browser in order to have access to these installable jailbreak applications.

Although Lima is not yet finished, the team has posted a YouTube video that shows it in action.

Why Does This Matter?

Jailbreaking is often written off by the mainstream news and tech community as a niche activity only undertaken by a small portion of iPhone (and other Apple device) owners. While that may be true, when you’re dealing with as large an install base as Apple has, it’s still a notable group.

According to Cydia creator Jay Freeman’s website, there are over 2 million jailbroken devices using his software. However, a more recent figure he gave to The Washington Post ups that number to 4.5 million. He also says that the Cydia operation now nets $10 million per year.

Freeman recently sat down for an interview with Rackspace’s Robert Scoble to talk about why users should jailbreak their iPhones. That video is available here on YouTube.