iMods A New Store For Jailbroken iOS Devices (Cydia Alternative)

As above 800 million various iOS devices has been sold by Apple in last few years, however the most recent public-facing figures expose that actually 1 in 10 of these iOS devices have been successfully jailbroken. With an objective of handling that issue, and expanding the jailbreak to a much larger audience this new store is approaching.

iMods Store

From a very long time, jailbreaking has been synonymous with the Cydia store. Whenever you jailbreak your iOS device, that is the iPhone, iPad and the iPod touch, Cydia is automatically downloaded. Some people think jailbreaking is just getting Cydia on your iOS device but it is much more than that. So a team of developers have set out to change this mindset and to change jailbreaking forever.

Enter iMods. A new kind of store and aimed at a very different audience.

Unlike Cydia which is a bit aimed towards the tech savvy audience of the iOS world. iMods is more focused on getting those non-tech savvy people. It plans to get the rest of the world towards customizing iPhone, iPad and iPod touch.

Secondly, since tweaks hosted on other repos can’t be hosted on iMod, that seems to be going in a direction that is not good for the devs of iMod. iMod being the new guy, most devs will pick BigBoss or ModMyi to host their tweaks. Also, the jailbreak community at the moment is so dangerously close to being a close-knit family that won’t let other players in, which is bad news for folks like the iMod devs. The harshness of treatment is painful to watch.

Thirdly, there is no interplay between Cydia and iMod (or that’s how it seems right now). When you purchase apps from Cydia, iMod won’t even recognize them or their existence on your device. Which is kind of bad because if you download a tweak that requires Activator (depedencies), iMod will download and install Activator even if you have it installed through Cydia already.

Given all these reasons, the backlash against iMod is kind of obvious. But it’s one heck of a backlash that I think shows the general trend of the jailbreak community these days. There seems to be no tolerance, no encouragement unless it’s for “my own good”, and absolutely no camaraderie.

We get following quires about iMods app store via iPhonehacks:

When iMods will release and how to install this:

“Great, so basically, we plan to release the official build along the iOS 8 jailbreak by offering a separate tool. This will ‘iMod’ the device, installing iMods. This will be done so that we can more easily distribute our market to new users who have never heard of Jailbreaking or have heard but don’t want to risk it. As we said before, we are targeting a somewhat different audience, but we would love to also have the existing jailbreakers use it as well.

The availability of the beta is a different thing, however. We will be providing it out to a select few for testing in about 2-3 months. We have currently been working on iMods for about 3 months. We spent a great deal of time on the UI, fine tuning it, going through different designs, and so forth and have been working on the store itself in code for about 2 months. Most of the server-side of things have been completed, we just need to integrate the app, and work on the dev portal mobile app.”

Why the current jailbreak community are not the primary target?

“The reason we are not targeting the existing community is because we believe that the number of people using iOS is so much more than the number of people who are jailbreaking. We asked ourselves why this was so. At first we thought that maybe the people who are using iOS and are not jailbreaking simply do not find the stuff found in the jailbreak community useful or interesting.

We soon found out that this was not the case. We went to our university and did a sample of people who had iPhones and showed them some of the jailbreak tweaks like BiteSMS and ColorFlow. They all loved it and asked how to get them, we then said jailbreaking and took note of their response. Their responses were clear, they were not in favor of jailbreaking, why? Because there is a negative stigma of it messing up your phone and it being hard to do.

So we decided to target this larger audience who likes the features but doesn’t want to go through the hassle of learning what tweaks work with what version of iOS, what tweak has a lot of bugs, what tweak does what, and so forth.”

Will the people will convince with these images?

“Actually, we found in our survey at the University of Akron that the people saw the features very cool. Like when shown BioProtect, they were like, ‘cool, I can use this to lock my Facebook so my friends don’t make posts I don’t want when they have my phone’. They actually really liked the features, they just saw it as something that was meant for tech savvy people. That is what iMods is about, rebranding jailbreaking and targeting it to these people. People who love the features but are hesitant to jailbreak for some reason or another.”

The way iMods work?

“The users won’t have to ‘jailbreak’ their phones, they will iMod them, a word that doesn’t carry that negative stigma [Editor's Note: Jailbreaking will still be required, this is an attempt at rebranding]. Furthermore, our store is built in a way that we can control what goes in it. If a tweak has a problem and it doesn’t work properly or causes random crashes often, we can take it down to not scare people who are using iMods. The store is made to be very user-friendly. They will see it and feel much more comfortable than if they were to use Cydia for the first time. A lot of people keep referring to us as a Cydia alternative, we keep trying to say how we are not.”

Cydia repositories will be supported or not?

“The repo exclusion clause was made to prevent multiple Debian repositories, also called Cydia repositories from having the same package, something that could cause a clash. However, iMods is not based off a Debian server and its server won’t be accessible through Cydia hence, iMods does not qualify as a Cydia Repo. The repo exclusivity agreement states, ‘I will not submit to another community source’, thus iMods exactly, because it’s not a Cydia source, is not affected by the above clause.”