SaurikIT (maker of Cydia) is pleased to announce that it has recently acquired Rock Your Phone (maker of... well, Rock Your Phone ;P).

Q: Did this really happen? SaurikIT actually bought Rock Your Phone?

A: Yes? ;P Well, sort of; I'd describe what happened more as a strategic reorganization of the two companies.

Q: What does that even mean? That makes no sense. What is happening?

A: The key thing to realize is that Intelliborn, the company that brought you such products as IntelliScreen and MyWi, are the same developers who created Rock Your Phone.

Unfortunately, due to some early miscommunication, rather than us being in a position where we were cooperating on platforms like Cydia, we ended up spending most of our time competing with each other over the course of the last two years.

This was not good: Rock ended up wasting a ton of effort reimplementing Cydia, while SaurikIT got dragged into an "apps battle" to compete with the Rock exclusives from Intelliborn.

The primary goal of this new world, then, is to put everyone "back on task", with a true collaboration rather than this incessant competition.

Q: OK, so what does that mean for me, the end user of all your software?

A: If everything goes well, it means that you will have at least twice as much awesome: instead of two groups of people fighting with each other over core functionality, more time is going to be spent expanding the platform in new directions.

Q: But... Rock was awesome! It was so much faster than Cydia it hurts. :(

A: Unfortunately, Rock's speed came from taking a few incorrect/dangerous shortcuts, which precipitated the event that really forced us to where we are now: an "essential upgrade" that was required for the Spirit jailbreak, which, when installed by Rock Your Phone, forced everyone to restore their devices and start over.

That said, we at SaurikIT are always trying to improve the speed of APT, the underlying package manager we use on the jailbroken iOS platform, and are now excited about our ability to concentrate on these platform issues full time, without interruption.

Q: Huh. Fair enough. But Rock had some really important features, like backups. What if I already have a backup saved in Rock Your Phone?

A: We are collaborating on this one (neat, huh? ;P), getting the backup feature into Cydia, and merging all of Rock Your Phone's existing backups into the Cydia databases so they can be used from Cydia as easily as Rock.

Q: Is Cydia going to get any other improvements? (Maybe on the iPad?)

A: One thing we are trying to do is to bring more developers to work on Cydia itself. For example, chpwn, who has been of immense help with some of the newer jailbreaks, has recently been doing a lot of work on how the different views of Cydia are navigated, which will be in the next release.

Q: How about comments and ratings? Rock had those, right? (Right?)

A: SaurikIT is working on coordinating with the major repositories and developers (which includes Rock Your Phone) on how to best bring ratings into the Cydia package ecosystem.

We have been working on this for a while, and have had multiple false starts: comments were even tested and then pulled for some serious community issues they caused. We believe this thought and experiment is going to mean you will love the result.

Q: Can you at least let me filter out all of the themes in Cydia? There are way too many themes: themes suck.

A: Certainly. In fact, Cydia has had this feature for two years now! ;P

Simply click Sections, then Edit, and turn off anything you don't want, like themes, ringtones, or fun itself.

Q: How about all of the software I bought in Rock? Will those licenses transfer over with my Rock ID?

A: Yep! We've been working really hard to make this work correctly, and although there are a few corner cases that still need to be handled, there's really not much work left to be done.

Q: Do I have any other questions?

A: I hope not... it's 5:45 AM here in California, and I didn't get much sleep last night (or the night before). :(