Hacker and unc0ver lead developer Pwn20wnd shared some reassuring comments with the jailbreak community via Twitter Thursday afternoon, elucidating that Cydia as a package manager wasn’t dead and that third-party developers besides Saurik (such as team unc0ver’s Sam Bingner) can still maintain it.
If you didn’t already know, the Cydia package manager is open source, which means that anyone can view its source code and update the software so long as they adhere to the license:
Cydia Substrate, on the other hand, is not open source, and judging from Saurik’s Tweetstorm last Friday, it doesn’t seem like he has any intention of open-sourcing it in the future due to its complexity, among other things.
The main takeaway from Pwn20wnd’s Tweets should be that while Cydia Substrate probably won’t be updated for A12(X) (and future) devices, team unc0ver can and will still maintain the open-source Cydia package manager.
As we’ve learned from some of Pwn20wnd’s previous comments, team unc0ver will try to implement full support for A12(X) devices in the future by way of an updated version of Substitute. This will effectively allow A12(X) devices that have been jailbroken with unc0ver to install and run jailbreak tweaks via Sam Bingner’s updated version of Cydia.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, there’s no official word on when that will be released. All we can do is advise patience as team unc0ver works on an official solution for the jailbreak community.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball court is the CoolStar-led Electra Team, which is currently working on the Electra12 jailbreak for iOS 12.0-12.1.2 devices with support for Sileo and Substitute instead of Cydia and Cydia Substrate/Substitute.
CoolStar has his reasons for dropping support for Cydia, namely the fact that it isn’t his project and that he doesn’t feel like supporting it over his own work (Sileo). But it remains to be seen how this will impact the jailbreak community, especially given Sileo’s reputation for deprecating the ways of older repositories like BigBoss and limiting the number of ads that can be served.
That aside, the Sileo Team is marching forward with Sileo’s development. The team shared a Tweet just this afternoon teasing that Sileo 1.0 with APT 1.8 would be available in just “a few days for both iOS 11 and 12,” adding that repositories should implement support for SHA256 hashes in the meantime:
Optimo of BigBoss has already announced publicly that he has no plans of updating the repository to work with Sileo, demonstrating his strong partiality to Cydia.
It remains to be seen when Electra12 with Sileo will be released, but we’ll continue to keep you updated as both the Electra Team and team unc0ver post updates about their work.
Which jailbreak are you looking forward to the most? Let us know in the comments section below.