Electra Team lead developer CoolStar took to Discord just this past week with a rather unfortunate update for Chimera and Electra jailbreak users: development on the platforms’ proprietary Sileo package manager has been suspended “until further notice.”
Citing the announcement, the decision to put Sileo’s development on hiatus stems from two significant factors, with the first being that CoolStar isn’t happy with Sileo’s acceptance rate in the jailbreak community and the other being out of exhaustion from contributing more to the project than the other project developers:
CoolStar also mentioned how it’s possible Sileo development could pick up again in the future, but this isn’t something he wants to guarantee or speculate on right now.
Any Chimera or Electra user knows already that these jailbreak tools install Sileo by default instead of Saurik’s tried and true Cydia package manager. Electra previously installed Cydia on users’ devices but support soon shifted to Sileo alone as CoolStar expected the latter to take off as a complete replacement. This worked to an extent, but only on CoolStar’s jailbreak platforms, as Pwn20wnd’s unc0ver tool still supports Cydia.
While the announcement may seem unsettling to some, it shouldn’t impact day-to-day jailbreak activities for those using the Chimera or Electra jailbreaks. The Sileo app itself will still work, but it just won’t receive updates as frequently (if at all). That said, it can still be used to install or uninstall jailbreak tweaks.
A point worth making, however, is that Sileo never came to fruition on any other jailbreak platforms besides those owned by CoolStar. Moreover, the Sileo Demo that could be installed on non-jailbroken handsets hasn’t been updated with the latest improvements introduced in the recent Sileo v1.5.0 release.
CoolStar recently announced that he would be wrapping up development for Chimera and Electra as he shifted focus to more exciting checkm8-related projects.
How do you feel about the current circumstances? Discuss in the comments.