The jailbreaking community has never been known for its patience, and now one reputable developer has apparently tired of it. Jay Freeman, perhaps better known by his Twitter handle Saurik, said he is tired of people “harassing” him and even regrets spending so much time on Cydia. In fact, it sounds like he’s considering not even releasing another Cydia Substrate update at all.
Jailbreaking should’ve stopped at iOS 9
Saurik posted a lengthy monologue over several posts on Twitter on Friday. He believes “jailbreaking should have stopped during the iOS 9 era, if not before.” He also said there’s a reason almost all “reasonable developers left long ago,” leaving the jailbreaking community left to be “run by bullies.”
“Everything that we do not just digs jailbreaking a deeper hole, full of fail,” he tweeted.
He doesn’t believe jailbreaking to be very important any longer, not even to fight copyright law. He also doesn’t find it fun any longer “due to the horrible developer toxicity.” He wishes people would forget that Cydia even exists, adding that he doesn’t actually owe anyone a Cydia Substrate update.
In the mean time, I owe nobody anything and nothing I have would help anyone anyway (and particularly won’t help anyone trying to support A12). I really wish everyone would just forget Cydia exists and move on with their lives; anything would be better than dealing with all this.
— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) April 19, 2019
Stop “harassing” Saurik
Saurik’s anger is interesting and also quite understandable. He is widely considered to be a trailblazer in the jailbreaking community. Without Cydia, many of the iOS exploits and tweaks which have become popular might not be accessible to the general public. Indeed, when someone is working on something for free, people would do well to remember that they’re on the volunteer’s timetable.
He doesn’t have to work on a Cydia Substrate update, although, apparently, he is trying to do so. He predicts it will take more than three weeks’ worth of work to update it, and he is asking jailbreak fans to stop “harassing” him.
In particular, harassing me and everyone around me via every communication channel you can figure out to contact me is _not_ going to make me somehow care _more_ about doing this: all you are doing is making me deeply regret having returned. I gain nothing from doing any of this.
— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) April 19, 2019
Will there be another Cydia Substrate update?
If Saurik stops contributing to the jailbreak community entirely, it wouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The good news is that it seems like he doesn’t hate everything about jailbreaking. In fact, while he doesn’t see the iOS 11 Cydia Subtrate update as a “‘healthy’ achievement,” he does “still enjoy working on Impactor” and even has some big updates he wants to release.
However, he added that it “just doesn’t seem possible anymore to have fun on Substrate,” although he is “quite proud of its stability.”
Saurik even hinted that there might not be another Cydia Substrate update. In fact, he has two conditions that must be met before he will release one:
_If_ (yes: “if”) I ever release A12 Substrate, it will not only be because I found a good way to achieve the goal that I consider “stable”, but it will also be because I have, at least momentarily, come to enjoy the process of working on it again; that might _never_ come to pass.
— Jay Freeman (saurik) (@saurik) April 19, 2019
