Just a few hours of ending this year, the major community founded in 2008 known as Hackulo has decided to shut down, taking its famous iOS piracy app "Installous" with it. The news will be and is currently impacting millions of active users.
Hackulo was mostly known for its Cydia repository, which included several "tweaks" for jailbroken devices. Among those tweaks, it included a shareware community app known as Installous. The application provided a wide catalog of free software shared by its community members.
The applications found there, were usually downloaded from the AppStore and illegally shared so that it could be downloaded straight from the site or Installous. Even though the community created an extended controversy, the founders claimed Installous was just a place for you to test applications before actually buying it. They strongly suggested to purchase applications you would normally end up liking after testing it completely. The website states the following:
"We are very sad to announce that Hackulous is shutting down. After many years, our community has become stagnant and our forums are a bit of a ghost town. It has become difficult to keep them online and well-moderated, despite the devotion of our staff. We’re incredibly thankful for the support we’ve had over the years and hope that new, greater communities blossom out of our absence.
With lots of love,
Hackulous Team"
The most important feature Hackulo had developed, was a service known as AppSync. The feature was automatically added after installing Installous. The magic behind AppSync, is that you had the ability to sync your device with iTunes, allowing the device to transfer downloaded content to iTunes just as if this was purchased from the AppStore.
Even when this is a serious hit to software piracy, it will also be affecting several iOS device users who relied on other applications held by the community repository through Cydia.
As some separate thoughts, we at iDevel0p kind of expected that or saw it coming. It is extremely hard to keep a site like Hackulo's running without being shut down by legal matters. But not only because of that, but we have seen a lack of importance to some iOS devices mod lately that we believe those who founded sites like Hackulo's are no longer taking the same importance to it, like it used to be a few years ago.
Sadly, these people are young people who did their contribution to the iOS community either on free time, because they liked it, or simply because they could do it. Regrettably, these great people are growing up, and these contributions rarely pays bills. Therefore, they might be seeking into a further way of earning money rather than spending from their free time in a contribution that won't even pay their website hosting.
Somehow if you notice, we haven't heard anything about an upcoming iOS 6 jailbreak for A5 devices or not even close to an iPhone 5 jailbreak promise, way too far from an iPad Mini jailbreak. That's simply because Apple Security is extremely complex and it requires a lot of time which some people is currently limited of.
The jailbreak community won't disappear anytime soon, but it requires of new talented members to be constantly looking forward on spending some time in the development.
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