Saurik shuts down Cydia Store amid reports of a bug

After supporting payments for a good nine years, Jay “Saurik” Freeman has finally shut down Cydia Store. Here’s all you need to know about it.

Why did Saurik shut the Cydia Store down?

Renowned developer Jamie aka Nullpixel first broke the news of Cydia Store having a very serious vulnerability. 

For those who don’t know, Cydia Store is the official payment system behind Cydia. It handles all tweak purchases and payments on BigBoss, which is one of the default Cydia repositories.              

Since Cydia repositories are just web pages, any repository can inject malicious code which can force the payment of a package without the explicit permission of the user. 

Subsequently, Saurik closed the entire backend of his proprietary payment system within hours of the report surfacing.

The old guard member, however, clarified, in a long-winded post, that this vulnerability was not a data leak and all private user data remains intact.

Saurik Cydia Store

Freeman also mentioned that the purchases going through the Cydia Store have almost come to a halt and he intended to close the service down eventually.  

According to some, this farce is the handiwork of several “trusted” to malign Freeman. Apparently, some developers from the Sileo Developer Team want to move the community away from Cydia.      

Here’s what AppleBetas, a team member of the Dynastic Development Team, posted on his private Discord server.               

Saurik continues to work on Cydia Installer and Substrate

As soon as the news broke, a good portion of the jailbreak community assumed that Saurik had shut down Cydia forever.

Thankfully, Saurik only closed the payment system, the Cydia installer continues to function as usual.

You can still download and use your favorite Cydia tweaks like you normally would.   

cydia

As far as a Substrate update goes, Saurik is still working on one but didn’t specify an ETA. The upcoming Substrate update will likely come bundled with the next iteration of unc0ver jailbreak for iOS 11.    

What next for the jailbreak community?

To be very honest, only a fraction of the users are affected by the closure of the Cydia Store.

As you already know, BigBoss repository only accepts payments for old packages and doesn’t accept paid packages anymore. 

If you’ve got your eye on a new package, you can purchase it from third-party payment systems of Packix, Chariz (formerly Hashbang), and Dynastic Development repositories.

Nearly all of the new sources support PayPal as a payment system. So, all you need to do is connect your credentials to their backend.

How does the closure of Cydia Store affect you? Leave your comments in the comments section below.          

One Response

  1. Andrei December 17, 2018

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