This is one of the few times where Cyssors beats Rock.
The latest “update” to Rock has effectively turned Cydia into the one, true jailbreak App Store. We all knew that this was coming thanks to the announcements on Cydia and Twitter, but I’m actually surprised at how many of Rock’s teeth have been removed (that is to say ALL of them).
If you choose to “update” Rock.app, all you’ll see when you load the new version up is a mobile-optimized webpage about Rock’s acquisition and a link to some free mp3. It’s really just a husk of the old app and I wonder why they bothered updating it at all.
To me, the philosophy behind jailbreaking is about giving iPhone users choice, even if the best or wisest hackers out there think of it as a bad one. I did read Saurik’s FAQ about how certain portions of Rock (particularly how it installed packages) could have been dangerous to the device, but frankly, I’ve had *much* more trouble with Cydia than I ever experienced with Rock. I used Rock for at least a year on two different iPhones and never ran into any major trouble.
To be clear: I don’t think that Saurik was lying about anything and I believe him when he says that Cydia is the safer jailbreak portal, but I don’t see why they had to kill every single part of what Rock was. I would have appreciated, at the very least, to continue using it as a license manager (Cydia doesn’t list which apps I own) and a general package manager for uninstalling apps and extensions.
I would have been alright with this whole ordeal if Cydia had been updated in the mean time to become a half-decent package manager, but it still sucks. I still see source (or is it repo?) errors every single time I load Cydia up, which forces me load the entire interface all over again. I’ve tried to fix these problems by deleting or resetting my source list, but the changes never seem to stick.
I’m sure we’ll see more Cydia developments down the line, but I think that gutting Rock was an untimely, if not simply a crappy decision. I’d even go so far as to say it’s tragic. Yesterday the jailbreak community had two functional package managers for installing and uninstalling third party content, but after this latest update I simply can’t shake the feeling that we’re all stuck with Cydia.
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