After many years of being available to users as a way to fully customize the operating system, the backbone that handles purchases on Cydia (which was only available to jailbroken devices) is today shutting down.

Saurik, the creator of Cydia, made the announcement on a Reddit thread Friday evening. He said that this was a long time in the making as the store was making little to no money. The store recently had a bug that may have put users at risk.

The reality is that I wanted to just shut down the Cydia Store entirely before the end of the year, and was considering moving the timetable up after receiving the report (to this weekend); this service loses me money and is not something I have any passion to maintain.

Needless to say, it sounded like the cost for maintaining the Cydia Store was not worth the hassle paired with the fact he no longer wanted to maintain it. For now, purchases on Cydia are currently disabled, meaning users can no longer purchase items directly from the Cydia Store.

To be clear, Cydia itself will still be around, however, the backend for payments (on the main repositories) will no longer be in service. You will still be able to download past purchases and make purchases on third-party repositories.

In the grand scheme of things, this will have little effect on the community itself as most developers on the platform have moved away from using the Cydia Store for purchases.

Saurik says that a more formal post is coming next week with further details regarding the future of the Cydia Store. His full statement can be found here.

Have you jailbroken your device in the past? Are you sad at the thought that the Cydia Store may be going away for good soon? Let us know in the comments below!

Update: This story has been updated to better reflect the changes related to purchases in the Cydia Store.

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