As I’ve mentioned before, I have great respect for Saurik, who runs Cydia, for his huge and positive contributions to the iPhone jailbreak community. I’m sure running Cydia is no easy task, but on days like today I really just wonder does using Cydia really have to suck so much.
Cydia is, rightly, considered to be the leading jailbreak app store, by some distance. So for most of us who are jailbroken, it is the app store we rely on for finding and installing good jailbreak apps.
And the experience when using it flat out stinks.
Today has been a great (or in this case horrible) reminder for me of how bad the experience is.
Cydia is slow to load and refresh its data, so you have a wait on your hands straight away when you launch it.
When it finishes loading I generally go straight to the Changes tab, to see what’s new. Today the Things for LockInfo plugin immediately caught my eye and I knew I wanted to take a look at it.
The plugin’s main screen said to scroll down for screenshots. There’s another very noticeable wait period while the page loads ads before I’m able to scroll down and see the Screenshots bar.
Once I tap the screenshots bar I get … nothing useful to me at all. Instead I just get a page with a banner for the plugin’s source – modmyi – and another general ad, and no screenshots anywhere to be found (after again waiting a fair while for that page to load). I tried refreshing the page a couple times – but no screenshots showed up.
So I gave up and ended up grabbing the plugin without seeing screencaps. Not the end of the world, but frustrating and just dumb really.
I’ve posted about this before, but I’ve seen no improvement in Cydia. No improvement on the slow loading pages. None on making the app description pages look consistent so that we know where to find certain bits of information comfortably and easily. And apparently no improvement in just having some minimal standards for what an app description must contain – like say a screenshot for example.
Again, much respect to Saurik for all he does for jailbreak users – but here’s hoping, wishing even, that he gets some help or whatever it takes to make Cydia less crappy to use.
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An improved Cydia is possible: look at what the Rock devs have done. Rock is stable, never crashes and way quicker than Cydia.
Cydia is the main app that makes me want to be able to block ads. I figure some entries to the hosts file to block the ads would help. I hate to do it though as I am not sure if Saurik makes money on simply displaying the ads or only for clicks. Plus I have been too lazy to do any research into what domains to block.
Sure. And it doesn't require a complete app rewriting. Just a better organisation in app presentation and the ability to wait for the installation end to respring instead of doing it after each app installation.
I'd deal with the apps if it loaded faster (especially at the beginning), had a consistent layout, and required uniform information like you said. I understand the use of ads, just make it a consistent and efficient system.
Half the rant of this post is not Saurik's fault. It's the repo manager's task to provide that content, Saurik just provides a Web View in which the repo managers decide what to show, in this case, Mod My I didn't have screenshots.
I agree Cydia is not perfect, and the long loading times are annoying, but don't blame Saurik for something that's not his fault.
I never said I felt any of this was Saurik's 'fault' – but I guess I expect that somebody has to set standards in order for the store to be less crappy to use. Thousands and thousands of different developers submit apps to the App Store, but they're all presented in a uniform way, so users know where to expect to see things, and they are there consistently.
Either a group of leading repo providers or Saurik or someone needs to establish a good set of standards for Cydia.
Why use Cydia when there is Rock?
Cydia is both a front-end for the iPhone port of APT (which Rock/Icy also uses and which saurik manages) and a web browser for package descriptions.
When you are looking at the description for a package, you are looking at a web page (the middle part of the description, anway). The web pages are managed by the respective repository owners (BigBoss, ModMyI, etc.). The advertisements also belong to the repo. owners, *not* saurik.
As anyone can start a repository and are able to design it to appear however they want, it would, sadly, be very difficult to accomplish uniformity among descriptions.
As per my comment above, I still feel as if there need to be some sort of standards agreed to and stuck to amongst all repos. They all agree to do XYZ in terms of what's on an app page and how it's presented, and they're made to stick to that or their apps don't get displayed. Surely that's not impossible.
i totally agree with this post. you said less and not a tiny bit more.
I switched to Rock last week. It feels like when I switched from HTC Touch to My 3gs.
I may consider Rock as well, but my impression is that most everything comes out first, and sometimes only, on Cydia – which is a problem with thinking of switching away from it.
I completely switched to Rock. Although Rock also have sometimes annoying slow commercials.
Yep, I agree. I am at the point where I literally cringe when going to open CYDIA as you dont know what to expect. Takes forever to load…takes forever refreshing data and is not near as 'stable' as it was just last year….it locks up and crashes, gives contant error messages and when downloading or updating something, it is a pure crap shoot as to whether everything goes smoothly or if you end up crashing the device. I think my blood pressure goes up about 50 points when just thinking of opening CYDIA..I too have great respect for Saurik but surely something can be done to at least cut back on some of these issues.
Rock your iPhone App is 5x faster then Cydia and you don’t have to wait 20 seconds to load, plus rock your iphone app has a better interface then Cydia.
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