Hacking A Closed Ecosystem

Jay Freeman (saurik), a contributor to the Android Open-Source Project, has been involved with rooted Android devices since he first wrote instructions for the installation of Debian armel onto the G1. Many Android developers are familiar with his work on Cyrket, an off-device browser for the Android Market. However, he is most well known for Cydia, an alternative to the App Store for “jailbroken” iPhones/iPads that specializes in “anything that is not an app”: in particular, distributing software based on MobileSubstrate, an open-source framework he developed to allow for the relatively sane modification of other applications. Cydia is installed on roughly 10% of iPhones worldwide and contains tens of thousands of packages.

• Website