Apple recently rejected the new Google Voice app in it’s app store which caused a bit of a stir in the industry. The FCC jumped in to this last week. All that aside, it has started to annoy developers that Apple have such a heavy hand on this matter. It appears that more and more developers are moving over to an underground app store for the iPhone called Cydia. This is the app store which is home to apps that Apple doesn’t approve.
The 5 month old store is run by Jay Freeman and is currently growing at a tremendous rate. About 10 percent of the 40 million iPhone/iPod Touch users have logged in to the store to download software. About 470000 users per day connect to the store which is an increase of just a few months ago that saw 350000 per day.
Kim Streich is a developer who uses the store and managed to earn $19,000 in sales in just 2 weeks through Cydia. This shows the potential that the store has.
To access the Cydia iPhone app store you must first jailbreak your iPhone using the iPhone Dev teams set of tools. They are free to use and relatively straight forwards.
For developers it allows a quick way to make some money. There isn’t as much competition and yet there are tons of users at the moment. This balance helps anyone who can make something decent earn something decent out of it. App developers just need to email the owner and apps are almost approved instantly which is far better than the weeks of not knowing what’s going on in the official App Store.
Take a full read of the wired article to see a more in depth review of what it all does.
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