Why Jailbreaking is Dying, and What We Can Do About It?

It’s commonly believed that the downfall of jailbreaking has been caused by the replacement of the most necessary tweaks by built-in iOS features. Largely, I think that this is not the case, because there are still so many things wrong with iOS, whether it’s:

• a lack of a dark mode
• lack of info in the photos app
• no default browser setting
• a locked down file system
• shitty multitasking
• no theming
• apps forcing their will on you 

We could go on and on naming the flaws in iOS.

The real reason jailbreak is dying is that Cydia—which used to be the anarchist’s App Store—has now become a junk yard that only enthusiast developers and power users are willing to sort through to find the tweaks that they need to actually use their phones in any meaningfully useful way. Nowadays developers don’t even bother making tweaks because nobody will even see what they make, which in turn leads more people to not even bother jailbreaking.

Here are a few ways to fix this:
1.Revamp Cydia: Cydia is largely the same as was back in 2008. Sure there are some new features, and it’s adapted to retina displays, but Cydia is not designed to handle the number of tweaks that have built up over the last decade. Cydia needs a huge redesign. It could start with adding filtering by iOS versions/devices, so that when and user searches for something, they know it’s supported on their device. However, we could go even further. If Cydia enabled ratings, rankings of the most downloaded tweaks, filtering by date of release, a featured page, app icons, and built in support for screenshots; then we just might be able to restore the popularity of jailbreaking. I’m a UI/UX and web designer, and I’m willing to help in any way I can, but much of this is just looking at the App Store, and copying all of its best features. Unfortunately, Saurik has said that he doesn’t believe in creating flags for iOS version, nor sorting by release date, so changing Cydia might not be possible.

2. Tweak Cydia: create a tweak that is automatically distributed with the next jailbreak that includes the features above.

3. Replace Cydia: This is what it might come down to. If Cydia doesn’t change, then the jailbreak community will need a new Cydia, and soon. Jailbreak’s popularity is at a record low, and if we don’t find a new way to deliver the latest tweaks, then no developer will even bother creating tweaks for jailbroken devices, and once there are no new tweaks for the lastest version of iOS, there will be no new jailbreaks. No developer will even bother looking for an exploit if nobody bothers building any tweaks for the latest version of iOS.

If we don’t do something soon, jailbreaking will die, new jailbreaks will start coming out less and less frequently, and Cydia will become an old archive, not useful for anyone without an ancient iPhone. I don’t know when the jailbreak for iOS 11 is coming out, but if we don’t make jailbreaking something entirely different, something new and exciting to trick out your device with, there very well may be no jailbreak for iOS 12. We’ll be forced to hand over control of our devices to corporations, to Apple and to companies like Google that profit off of forcing ads on us and selling our data, and that’s no place I want to be. The way tweaks are distributed will have to change.The redditor has ideas and plans for those, but he needs help. We have to band together and create a new App Store, one where anyone can put something without having to pay to be a developer, a place where we own our devices and can use them the way we want to.

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