Apple Gets Favor In Verdict Against Cydia

(RTTNews) - US District judge ruled in favor of Apple Inc (AAPL) in a 2020 lawsuit filed by Jay Freeman, the creator of Cydia, the App Store counterpart for jailbroken iPhones. However, Freeman is looking to file an amended complaint by January 19.

District judge, Yvonna Gonzalez Rogers has dismissed Freeman's argument that Apple holds an illegal monopoly over the app distribution on iOS. Freeman's platform lets the users install all kinds of apps on iPhones and iPads and also allows the users to tweak and change the entire look and feel of iOS. In the lawsuit, Freeman claimed that Cydia is the precursor of the App Store and the only "comprehensive solution" to the monopolization of the app market that Apple has nurtured.

The platform was created back in 2008, months before the first iteration of the App Store was launched. SBSettings, one of the functionalities of Cydia that allowed the users to make changes to do the tweaks has a close resemblance with what the iPhone users today see as the Control Center.

At its peak, Cydia had more than 4.5 million users who were jailbreaking iPhones. Soon Apple caught wind of it and made it impossible to jailbreak iPhones making it difficult for Cydia to manage its operations. The company earned $10 million during 2011 and 2012 from app developers and then went out of business. The lawsuit seeks damages for the harm Apple has caused to the company.

However, the judge has declared the motion for Tim Cook's company and Freeman now has till January 19 to amend the complaint. Apple will have till February 2 to file its response. Apple has stood firm on its ground claiming that Android poses as a very big and potent rival to App Store and therefore it is not a monopoly. Apple has also reiterated the safety and privacy benefits of Apple's security module which is non-existent in third-party apps.