ModMyI reports that SaurikIT LLC just acquired Rock Your Phone Inc. In other words, Cydia bought Rock. Cydia has always been the installer of choice for most of us, but Rock was slowly getting traction, especially for some of its advanced features like the ability to back up your packages.
If you didn’t think the jailbreak community was a big business on its own, then it’s time to think again. Just like in the App Store, there is a lot of money to be made from applications, especially for those offering a marketplace like the App Store and Cydia.
Details of the acquisition have not been made public, but here’s what it means to you: Rock.app will essentially dwindle away. There will be a transitional period for the next 10 days where users can purchase/download apps and licenses in Rock. After that, users will use their Cydia Store login to retrieve their purchased apps. The large majority of themes/apps from Rock will be moved over to Cydia (most are already there right now). Rock will have a notice on it’s first page, and APT updates will discontinue in the near future (so Rock would be useless even if you had it).
There’s always been an ongoing battle between Cydia and Rock. I for myself have always preferred Cydia over Rock but I admit that it started growing on me. Its ease of use, its speed and the fact that it backs up your packages was a very big deal for me. It seems that we’re not gonna have much options anymore and we’ll solely have to deal with the slow Cydia from now on, which according to Saurik should see some updates in the near future:
Rock’s backup feature will be coming to Cydia. Rock only had faster loading because it did not honor APT correctly, so there were numerous buggy situations where you got screwed: there was even a recent time when Rock was screwing up an installation so core that everyone had to restore… Rock’s speed was just because it was sloppy.
Since jailbreaking was made legal a few weeks ago, there’s been more and more focus on what used to be considered an underground activity. I’ve always been in favor of a healthy and competitive market that gives options to users. I don’t think it’s going to happen anymore now that the two major installers are becoming one.
What do you think?