Jailbreak Alliance: Cydia Acquires Rock, App Stores Merge

Cydia and Rock Your Phone, two of the biggest unofficial app stores for jailbroken iOS devices, have joined hands to build a single alternative to the iTunes app store. Cydia has acquired Rock Your Phone and the latter will shutdown its app store after 10 days. All Rock users have been encouraged to set up a Cydia account to which their purchases can be migrated.

The unification of these two heavyweights is likely to put pressure on Apple. Till now, Cydia and Rock were competitors. And now, they are partners in crime (not exactly, since jailbreaking is now legal)!

This announcement was made on Rock Your Phone site which mentions “Sales have moved to Cydia!” and provides details on how existing Rock users can migrate to Cydia. Though Jay Freeman’s Cydia is widely regarded as the #1 jailbroken app store, Rock boasts of impressive statistics as well. With more than 2+ million users and nearly 4.6 million iOS devices served, Rock has been a runaway success story in the jailbreak app world. Cydia is even bigger but its founders have always shied away from making any public disclosures. After the unification, Mario Ciabarra, Rock’s chief in-charge will continue producing jailbreak apps as earlier while Jay Freeman will look after the combined business activities.

So, how does this deal affect Rock users? Customers who have purchased apps via Rock will be able to port their licenses across to Cydia by using their Google Account or Facebook account to login to Cydia, automatically transferring the licenses. Coincidentally, Cydia already hosts several Rock apps and themes.

Consolidation is the name of the game, especially when you have to take on the likes of mighty Apple. I’ve always been a Cydia fanboy but I liked Rock in bits and pieces as well. I’m pretty excited about this announcement. IMO, it augurs well in the interest of jailbreak community. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Apple iPhone, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.