In what seems like a small victory against app piracy, the Hackulous team announced today on its site that it is shutting down, bringing down its most popular apps in the process: Installous and AppSync.

Although it’s still unclear what the reasons behind the shut down are, Hackulous claims on its website that it’s mostly due to stagnant forums and the difficulty to moderate them. Although I never hang out in the forums, I find it hard to believe that there was little activity in there, especially given the notoriety of Hackulous in the piracy world…

The short message left by the Hackulous team on the website reads as follow:

Goodnight, sweet prince. We are very sad to announce that Hackulous is shutting down. After many years, our community has become stagnant and our forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the devotion of our staff. We’re incredibly thankful for the support we’ve had over the years and hope that new, greater communities blossom out of our absence. With lots of love,

Hackulous Team

As far as I know, Installous was the easiest and fastest way to install cracked apps onto your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. At this time, it appears that the Hackulous repo is down, meaning that you can’t install Installous or AppSync anymore, those two apps being necessary to install cracked apps from third party pirate sites.

As I mentioned above, this is just a small victory against app piracy in general. I’m fairly certain that other developers will pick up where Hackulous stopped, and will likely provide updated versions of Installous and AppSync in the future.

App piracy is one of the reasons why some people jailbreak their iOS device, and the fact that there is no untethered jailbreak for iOS 6, and more specifically no jailbreak at all for the iPhone 5 might be one of the reasons why Hackulous is shutting down.

If you were an Installous user, it looks like you’re going to have to spend $0.99 on that app after all. If you are a developer, I’m sure you’ll be happy to hear the news. If you are an iOS user, consider this day a victory for iOS and a chance to have an amazing developer community keep coming up with awesome apps.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]