I always feel more than a little bad about making criticisms of Cydia – because I recognize that Saurik (its creator) is one of the giants of the jailbreak arena, a guy who’s done as much for the jailbreak community as just about anyone.
And Cydia is very much the leading jailbreak app store, which in itself is a great and much appreciated service to all of us who jailbreak our iPhones.
Having said all that, I still find interacting with Cydia a pretty unpleasant experience. It is far slower than the App Store, and its interface is much less attractive and effective. Another thing about it that annoys the living crap out of me is the inconsistency in its App details pages.
Some apps show screenshots under a Screenshots section. Some show them under the More Info section.
Some app pages have ads quite near the top of the page. Some have them placed quite a bit farther down.
Possibly most irritating of all, some apps show a Recent Changes section to let you know what has changed in their latest version – which is especially useful when a new update comes out. Other apps do not have that section and do not offer any change log or ‘What’s New’ type information.
Overall, there is almost nothing consistent to cling to in Cydia’s app pages. In the App Store you find that muscle memory can kick in when looking at an app’s page, because all the elements are always in pretty much the same places on the pages. You can’t do this at all in Cydia because everything is all over the place, and there are not enough consistent elements.
It seems to me that everything varies wildly between different sources – as in, BigBoss sourced apps’ pages look starkly different to apps from the ModMyi repository – and apps from other repos look quite different to either of those two.
I think it would make for a far more pleasant and effective user experience if Cydia could impose some standards for app pages.
What do you all think? Happy with how things are in Cydia or agree that this could do with improvement? What are your Cydia wish list items?
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I agree on both points – if there are enough consistent elements for users to navigate easily and find good info quickly, that'd work for me – and absolutely the firmware / system requirements is a good call.
NoCyfresh anyone?
In regards to the main post, yes. Absolutely. I 100% agree. It annoys me daily to tap on an app in Cydia and have it just sit there for ages. There isn't even a little spinny thing telling me that it's still loading the description details. Then when it finally loads, I see nothing but a massive ugly ad covering the ENTIRE screen. I scroll down and who knows what I'm actually going to get. I can't stand devs that don't give changelogs. I hate not getting screenshots. Frankly, I hate that developers do have so much control. Descriptions are many times misleading or not detailed enough to actually explain what exactly you're getting. Screenshots are many times not available. For free apps, that's fine, but it amazes me how many of the paid Cydia apps are that way. To be honest, that kind of experience makes me almost understand why the crack scene is as big as it is. I would be pissed off if I bought some of these apps being sold on Cydia for $5+ that are absolute garbage and don't even do what the description leads you to believe they do. I'm a movie and TV show thief, but I'm proud to say I still pay for every one of my iPhone apps. I, in no way, condone the use of pirated apps, but with such a terrible system currently in place I can start to see why it's so big.
I do greatly appreciate the work Saurik and the repo maintainers have done. Obviously, it's better than nothing. But yes, both the App Store and Cydia are in desperate need of some very big changes. I understand everybody wants to keep everything open and give developers the freedom to do what they like, but it makes for a very poor user experience. Things can remain open and free, even if the major repos (BigBoss, ModMyi, etc.) are more strict and stop allowing everything and anything. Anybody in the world is free to run their own repo if they want their app description to be annoying, unorganized, misleading, etc. The big boys should have some standards.
Well said, as always – and of course I agree. Open and free shouldn't have to translate to messy and inconsistent.
Isn't that one a little hard to manage? In Apple's view, the files modified by themes are system files. Are you going to take all those out back?
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