Jay Freeman
More info
- Alias
- saurik
- Founded
- SaurikIT
- Known for
- Cydia (2008), Cydia Substrate, Cydia Impactor
The developer known as saurik, who built Cydia, the app store for jailbroken iPhones, and with it the plumbing for an entire shadow iOS economy.
The first iPhone jailbreaks in 2007 got you into the phone, but offered no sane way to install anything once you were there. Freeman released Cydia in February 2008: a graphical front end to Debian's APT, with package repositories anyone could host. An alternative store for iOS existed before Apple's own App Store had even opened.
His most widely used code, though, was Cydia Substrate (originally MobileSubstrate), a framework for hooking arbitrary functions in other processes. Practically every jailbreak tweak was built on it. In 2018 he shut down purchasing in Cydia, as the market shrank along with the supply of public jailbreaks. In December 2020 his company sued Apple on antitrust grounds — a late but fairly logical coda.