If you have jailbroken your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch you'll know there were two apps stores you could use to get apps not approved by Apple - Cydia and Rock Your Phone.We've already reported how Rock sold out to Cydia. We don't know any more details. We don't know if Cydia bought Rock or for how much. Although, it almost certainly did.
Well, now Rock is no more. It has finally shut its doors and you are redirected to Cydia.
The take-over or merger or whatever it was, has- not surprisingly- provoked customers into asking just how much Rock was/Cydia is worth? We know the official iTunes Apple App Store rakes in a shedload. And should we be worried that Cydia is now the only jailbreak app store?
The venerable blog iDB recently lamented the passing of Rock. And, interestingly, in the blog comments is a defence of Cydia....by its owner, Jay Freeman or Saurik as he's probably better known. Here's his comment:
I do not understand why people think I make money off of ads in Cydia: I run like three ads. 99.99% of the ads you see in Cydia, the ones that are posted on packages that I don’t host, have nothing to do with me: the money from those goes to the repositories.Also, I really seriously do make so much less money doing Cydia than I did consulting (which I could go back to doing at the drop of a hat) it hurts. If I calculated out my hourly right now I’m probably not even making minimum wage. I do this because I care about this movement, but I’m really getting tired of being berated by /everyone/ that I’m somehow in this for the money.
I work on this project nearly all of my waking hours, whether it is something random and technical that no one even realizes I did (like the work I did today on the icon scraper that was affecting some packages) to talking to every single person I can at conferences that I go to, despite being sufficiently introverted that I’d rather go crawl into a ball and die in the corner.
So, if you want to tell me “Cydia needs work on X”, by all means do so, but know that I probably either know of X and are working on it or after two years of deliberation believe X to be a mistake (in which case, X may in fact have been a feature of Cydia two years ago and has since been removed, such as “don’t respring until the app is closed”, which everyone wants but really causes all kinds of horrible problems).
But, if you want to just sit around and whine that I’m somehow going out of my way to screw you out of your money, you are totally wrong and are just being mean and insulting, and if enough of you really want to believe that then this movement has failed and I should give up and go back to doing a real job for real money rather than wasting my life trying to push it forward 
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.(Also: people seem to be mistaking “monopoly” with “community”, which is a pity. Cydia is open source, and there are now even more people who are working on improving it. Why people believe that instead of everyone working together to make a single thing great we should be spending all of our time fighting each other and fracturing our efforts is totally a weird concept to me.)