There was a time when tweaking OS X was a mostly unknown practice not so many users were willing to dedicate their time to. Modding the basic functionalities and look of the Mac required you to delve deep into forums, tutorials, Terminal hacks, resource packages, manual installations, broken mods on each software update. Modders always had a hard time trying to figure out how to best hack the Mac to make it perform and look the way they wanted.
Cydia for iPhone changed that. The whole jailbreak community changed the approach to modding and hacking on Apple devices. By providing a unified experience that’s similar to the App Store model, but for tweaks, Cydia offers anyone the possibility to create something and release it publicly or privately for free. The “something” mentioned above is mostly made of tweaks, apps, themes and app mods Apple would never accept in its App Store. But that’s fine: Cydia was meant to provide a place for the stuff that couldn’t find its way past the app review team’s gates. A place that, together with the freedom of installations, also grants automatic updates, easy discovery and detailed information about what you’re going to put on your devices.
As you may know, Cydia had such a great run so far that its creator Jay Freeman, a.k.a. Saurik, developed a native version for jailbroken iPads and announced the acquisition of former competitor RockApp. With the help of members of the Dev Team, they updated Cydia in the past weeks to feel even better on the iPad, and eliminate some annoyances such as a laborious queue functionality. From several standpoints, Cydia is even more intuitive than Apple’s own Store.
Now Freeman wants to bring Cydia to the Mac. Since he made the announcement at the 360|MacDev event last week, I’m hearing complaints from hundreds of users and bloggers alike who are firmly convinced the guy’s “biting off more than he can chew”. According to them, Cydia for Mac would be useless and redundant, as the Mac is not iOS and there’s no need to provide an additional layer to install free, and even worse, paid hacks and mods. Put simply, they think Saurik only wants to monetize a platform that doesn’t need anything but Apple’s Mac App Store. I don’t know the details behind Freeman’s effort to bring Cydia to the Mac (nor do I want to discuss revenues and Paypal fees for tweaks sold through Cydia), but here’s why I think OS X needs Cydia.
The Mac needs Freeman’s Cydia for the same reason the iPhone did two years ago: to overcome Apple’s restrictions and offer the chance to tinker with the system. But you can already play around with the Mac and change the Dock’s appearance, make the menubar black and install tabs in the Finder, right? Sure. Just as you can also install OpenSSH on your iPhone and apply themes manually and go search for Mac apps on each developers’ websites. Cydia for Mac and the upcoming Mac App Store, actually, have a lot in common: both Jobs and Freeman want to make sure users have a unified infrastructure to install apps and hacks, respectively.
It’s all about integration with the device, instead of the manual process of modding a platform, or go looking for third-party software on the internet.
On a more practical level, Cydia for Mac can offer developers and hackers the possibility to showcase their creations to a much bigger audience than some OS X modding forum or a few links on Twitter. As Freeman told Ars Technica yesterday the CydiaSubstrate for Mac (a framework he’s developing to run Cydia apps on OS X) “can also target a particular application for modification”. This is, of course, something that Apple would never let past the App Store, yet think about being able to easily mod TimeMachine’s backup frequency, the Finder’s cut & paste functionality or Tweetie’s support for retweets without having to manually search and install hacks from the web. It’s all about ease of use, unification and auto-updates. And while Cydia for Mac would remain something specifically geared towards the average tinkerer (not your non-tech savvy friend who’s excited about Flight Control coming to the Mac App Store), it certainly would also be the best way for those tinkerers to discover, install and manage mods on OS X.
No technical details have been provided by Freeman about CydiaSubstrate (will users have to “respring” a Mac? Will it mimic the iPhone interface?), so we’re just discussing about the potential of the platform. And the potential is enormous, since no one ever tried to set up a “store for mods”.
The fundamental differences between iOS and OS X make it clear that this whole Cydia for Mac story is not about “jailbreaking OS X”. The Mac already allows you to tweak the system, install themes and activate mods. With Cydia, Freeman wants to put all the pieces together and let hackers do their job in a single, unified place.
Cydia for Mac and the Mac App Store seem to share the same underlying philosophy, after all.
