Popular Jailbreaker 'Comex' is working on a Cydia alternative

Popular hacker and iOS jail breaker 'Comex' is now working in association with iMods, a Cydia alternative, to develop a Mobile (Cydia) Substrate replacement called Substitute. Comex and iMod team have reportedly completed the ‘Substitute’ which is focused on providing the code injection platform for hooking advanced functionality into apps and bypassing OEM restrictions on the device.

Last year iMods have published a teaser video showing the UI design of their Cydia alternatives. The development of the Substitute is not fully complete, as it have some bugs and it lacks some of the features like Safe Mode.

Comex have listed three reasons for his work on Substitute on GitHub page. The main reason reads-

“The way I see it, jailbreaking is fundamentally about taking something closed and fixed and opening it up to hacking and modification: perhaps allowing a mess to be made, but quite possibly ending up with something unique and different. This ideal of openness is very similar to that of free software, and I therefore believe that it’s in the spirit of jailbreaking to make as much low-level stuff open as possible, both for inspection and modification by curious users.”

'Saurik' who is the developer behind Cydia, have not given much attention on this new initiative via Comex and iMods. On the blog post Saurik wrote his reasoning behind his decision making, “I am not “just a storefront”. However, if you compete with me on the storefront, you not only indirectly affect my interest to keep working in the community, but you directly affect my ability to spend time doing so… Because if you are, you aren't just picking a fight, you are walking into one you can’t win: where on the one side is losing quickly, and the other side is still losing, it’s just losing a little bit later, after the infrastructure you are relying on crumbles and key parts of the developer and support community (first- and third- party) disappear.”.