Frequently Asked Questions

Who are you, and why do you do this stuff?

I run an alternative to the App Store for jailbroken iOS devices (specializing in everything that isn't actually an "app" at all) called Cydia; I am a member of the (probably poorly named) "iPhone Dev Team", the group that writes the popular jailbreak tools, but I really specialize in everything that happens "after the hack": acting as a sort of "community manager" for the ecosystem of users and developers, and coordinating the efforts of the various groups.

In addition to some of the popular tweaks, one thing in particular that I work on and am known for is called Cydia (Mobile) Substrate, a framework and development library used by developers to reasonably sanely (and hopefully safely) make modifications to code written by other developers and running in other processes, even if multiple people are attempting to modify the same thing; this library is the foundation of most of the interesting hacks found on the iPhone.

(I also give large numbers of talks at conferences about all of this, and so the previous two paragraphs are pretty much just me typing my introduction; if you search around on YouTube you can find me saying almost the exact same thing in numerous contexts.)