[matthewtse]

yes, quite a few hoops to jump through to get something working.

Back in the day, I went through massive effort to jailbreak my iPhone, void the warranty, and use the Cydia app store (amazing that this whole community operated for free).

But slowly the vanilla iPhone experience got good enough that I didn't need to jailbreak anymore, or at least it wasn't worth the effort. And the community died down as well.

Interesting to see the resurgence of a similar concept.

[aranelsurion]

I guess community of it died also because of how difficult/rare jailbreaks got, with some significant time of droughts between jailbreaks. Also jailbreaks had too many downsides; some apps would be too invasive, crash the Springboard, some secure apps (bank etc) wouldn't run, iirc updates weren't possible or hard to do, "tethered" jailbreaks required restoring them each time you reboot etc. etc. Too much day-to-day fighting against the system at the end.

Alternative stores OTOH have a lot more promise, if Apple can't manage to kill them through malicious compliance. They have a lower barrier of entry, and most downsides of JB don't apply either.