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20 September 2013

Who Created Cydia For Iphone

We’ve all heard of Jay Freeman, although some will know him better as Saurik. He’s the man behind Cydia, the man responsible for housing all of those wonderful jailbreak apps and tweaks that anyone in the jailbreak community loves. But, how much do we know about the man himself? What else has he done ?

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To be honest, not much is known about his early life, mainly because he prefers to keep his personal life out of the limelight. From 2004 to 2009 he was a PhD student at the University of California but still took the time out to take on Apple, to try to beat them at their own game.

About Cydia :

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Cydia was first released in 2008, February to be precise, as an alternative to Apple’s installer app (AppStore App ). By 2009 Freeman estimated that around 10% of the then iPhone owners had installed it on their devices.  By 2011 Cydia was reporting annual revenue of around $10 million with a net profit of about $250,000. At that time 4.5 million people were using it weekly.

Freeman isn’t just responsible for Cydia. He’s been a busy man over the years; he has his ownCydiaRepo, called Telesphoreo Tangelo and is responsible for the creation of Winterboard. Just recently he has been very active and has made several discoveries.

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A little while ago he purchased Google Glass and promptly rooted it, although he called it jailbreaking.  He has created a Cydia Substrate for Android, giving developers their own platform on which to customize their apps and software. And, his most notable discovery to date is a fix for the “Android Master Key” bug. This is a bug that was discovered by BluBox Labs and has been doing the rounds for 4 years, potentially infecting millions of Android devices. The fix can be found on his website.