This doesn't mean you'll be without your existing apps. Repositories will still be available to download, Freeman said, even though the necessary bandwidth represents the "majority of [his] costs" for Cydia.

The community will carry on -- the whole point of jailbreaking is that you're not beholden to any one developer or app portal. Nonetheless, it's easy to see this as symbolic of jailbreaking's decline. The option to run unsanctioned code was hot in the iPhone's early days, when iOS had many more limitations and a homebrew app could enable major features like third-party keyboards. There's simply less pressure to leave the official boundaries at this point, especially when Apple tends to be quicker about patching the security flaws that enable jailbreaks in the first place.

Update 12/15 5:17PM ET: The article has been updated to clarify that this represents a purchasing shutdown.