Patrick recently wrote a piece on how slow and painful using Cydia can be, so I thought I’d offer a little bit of information on the other major jailbreak app portal, Rock Your Phone. In my experience Cydia is still the top dog in terms of new app releases and popularity, but Rock has been doing some serious catching up – especially with the release of Rock 2.2. Rock Your Phone has access to almost all of the repositories on Cydia, and with the new License Central is able to recognize all of your purchased Rock and Cydia licenses, so Rock really can become the one jailbreak app to rule them all.
Rock Your Phone
Rock works just like Cydia does, but with a different paint job and better performance. You can install it through Cydia or via Blackra1n (I did), and, once installed, Rock can manage all of your currently installed Cydia packages, so you won’t need to manage two different libraries. As mentioned above, Rock can also recognize Cydia licenses (for apps like Overboard, SnowCover Pro, etc.), so even though the apps may not be available for purchase on the Rock app store, you’re free to upgrade, re-download, or re-install your purchased Cydia apps from within Rock once you’ve set up a Rock ID.
Ten day trials on all Rock apps
There isn’t a huge library of Rock apps, but all of the commercial apps offered in the Rock store feature 10-day trials. This has definitely been useful for me, since I’ve tried a couple of Rock apps that really haven’t worked out for me (AnyRing, iSmart Dialer, and MyProfiles are a few) and I never had to pay a cent for them.
Rock Extensions vs Cydia’s Mobile Substrate
I’m not a huge technical expert when it comes to the guts of jailbreak, but as I understand it, Rock has taken some flack on various mobile forums because it runs something called Rock Extensions in the background. This isn’t just a Rock thing, though: Cydia runs something called Mobile Substrate in the background.
I asked the founder of Rock Your Phone, Mario Ciabarra, about the issue and he had this to say:
“Rock Extensions is a port of mobile substrate…Each are simply ‘loaders ‘ of ‘extensions ‘ that hook into iPhone apps (ie, SpringBoard which is also your lock screen), Phone, Mail, etc. These loaders don ‘t do much and their footprint is extremely small (they ‘re literally just a few lines of code). Thus, it doesn ‘t really affect the user/system to have both installed.”
My experience over the past few months seems to ring true with what Mario said: my iPhone 3GS hasn’t taken any noticeable performance hit with Rock Extensions and Mobile Substrate running in the background. My iPhone is also still very stable for the most part, but that’s also because I’m fairly careful about running too many background processes.
Faster, Cleaner, and more streamlined
Loading Rock and refreshing the database of new releases takes about four seconds in total (over wi-fi). This knocks the socks off of my consistent one-minute load times for Cydia, where the interface loads up, something messes up, and the whole UI reloads itself. Installing and uninstalling packages – whether they be themes, mods, or apps – is also much easier in Rock. You still navigate packages by categories or find them via the search bar, but once you tap on the “Install” button Rock will take care of the rest for you. You can even have the installation screen minimize itself automatically so you can continue to browse for packages while your previously selected one installs.
Uninstalling packages is also a simple affair: one tap to head to the Manage tab, scroll to the package you want to go kaboom, and then swipe to delete (or tap on the package and press the uninstall button like in Cydia).
Rock Solid
Unless Cydia suddenly receives a massive speed boost (and I’ve heard rumours of this on Twitter), I’ll be sticking to Rock for all of my jailbreak management. Jailbreaking is supposed to be about unlocking the true potential of the iPhone’s hardware and software, and the speed and effeciency with which Rock operates matches that idea far better than Cydia’s minute-long “reloading data” pop-up does.
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TAGS: iPhone, jailbreak app store
