Installous

» see hackulo.us as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Installous was the part of jailbreaking that nobody defended in public. Apple's App Store opened in July 2008 and the jailbreak scene arrived on top of it almost immediately, and by early 2009 a forum called Hackulous had shipped a Cydia package that listed cracked IPA files from an index called AppTrackr and installed them on the phone. You did not need a computer or a payment method. You needed a jailbroken device and the Hackulous repository added to Cydia.

The iPhone reached Turkey late and priced well above what the phone was worth to most people here, and plenty of the handsets on the street before that were gray-market imports unlocked by whoever brought them in. Jailbreaking in that setting was usually about making an imported, carrier-locked device work at all, which is a different motive from the one Installous served. Installous sat one step past that line. I knew the name, which by itself says something about how far the scene traveled, and that is as close as I got to it.

What Installous cost Apple is not knowable from the outside, and the developers it actually hurt were the small ones, the two-dollar utility makers whose entire business was volume at a low price. Apple's answer over the following years was structural rather than legal. Each iOS release closed more of the holes the jailbreak depended on, and App Store pricing collapsed toward free with in-app purchase, which removed most of the reason to go looking for a cracked copy of a paid app.

~ the dossier ~

~ the three pieces ~

Hackulous shipped a toolchain rather than a single app. Crackulous stripped Apple's FairPlay DRM off an application the user already owned and produced a distributable IPA, and AppTrackr indexed what came out of it. Installous was the front end: a browsable store with search and screenshots, which made it look more like a real app store than Cydia ever did.

AppSync was the piece that mattered most to the mechanics. iOS refuses to install an application whose signature does not check out, and AppSync patched the installation daemon so it would accept anything. That is also why AppSync outlived Installous by years. It is the same patch you need to sideload software that is not pirated at all, and forks of it were still being maintained long after the store it was built for had closed.

~ goodnight sweet prince ~

On 30 December 2012 the Hackulous site was replaced with a short notice that opened with the line "Goodnight, sweet prince." Nothing in what followed mentioned Apple or a lawyer. "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." It thanked the people who had supported it over the years and hoped that greater communities would grow out of its absence. The sign-off was "With lots of love, Hackulous Team".

That is an unusual cause of death for a piracy operation. Nothing was seized and nobody was charged. The forum that produced the software simply emptied out, and it emptied out because the jailbreak underneath it was shrinking. Untethered jailbreaks were arriving later and later after each iOS release, and Installous depended on a steady supply of people willing to break their phone open on day one. The untethered jailbreak for iOS 6 did not land until February 2013, by which time the store that would have fed on it was already gone.

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