The Cydia vs. Sileo debate rages on, especially as there are now two competing jailbreaks for iOS 12 in addition to iOS 11 – the Electra Team’s Chimera jailbreak and Pwn20wnd’s unc0ver jailbreak.

While Chimera is the only jailbreak to offer full-fledged support for A12(X) devices out of the box, with unc0ver only ‘partially’ supporting A12(X) at the time of this writing, one significant caveat for many jailbreakers is that Chimera installs Sileo as the default package manager instead of Cydia.

While so many jailbreakers have expressed their gung-ho attitudes for jumping onboard with the shiny new Sileo package manager, one fact remains: the environment feels much more controlling than its Cydia counterpart. This notion was validated once again Friday morning when the Sileo Team announced that support for webview-based repository depictions would be removed by December 2019:

Sileo is particularly renowned for displaying an unsightly red banner across every jailbreak tweak depiction that is displayed via webview rather than the faster native view, and there’ve even been a few jailbreak tweak releases to do away with it. Sadly, this would become useless if the Sileo Team moved forward with such bold plans.

Many prominent jailbreak community members have spoken out against the Sileo Team’s announcement to eradicate support for webview depictions before the end of 2019, including Packix repository maintainer Andy Wiik, RootlessJB 3.0 lead developer Jake James, and jailbreak tweak developer LaughingQuoll:

With Wiik threatening to remove Packix support for Sileo and James threatening the release of a jailbreak tweak that would re-enable support in the future, the Sileo Team is now pressured with doing the right thing or risking loss in market share to Cydia; especially since the Packix repository is one of the most active repositories for jailbreak tweak releases today.

Sileo Team co-developer @nullpixel responded to the criticisms, noting that he “had no part in the decision” to remove support for webview-based tweak depictions. This would indicate that the command came from higher up in the Sileo Team, purportedly from project lead developer CoolStar himself:

Apparently, this response didn’t faze the angry, as Wiik responded saying that @nullpixel should have more say in the matter as a respected co-developer of Sileo.

Sileo is known for taking cheap shots at grandfathered repositories. As the record shows, Sileo doesn’t host packages directly from the BigBoss repository, but rather from a mirror designed to speed things up. Moreover, Sileo attempts to limit the number of ads that the BigBoss repository can display, which prevents BigBoss from generating ad-based revenue to keep the lights on.

Optimo, the BigBoss repository’s maintainer, has been particularly outspoken against Sileo, adding that he has no plans to update the BigBoss repository to support the newer package manager.

Based on the circumstances, we can only hope that the Sileo Team will change its mind and allow repositories to choose how they want to host their packages. The whole point of jailbreaking is to have ‘choice’ and an ‘open system;’ not for someone in the comfy executive chair to tell the jailbreak community how they will use their jailbroken devices.

How do you feel about the current situation? Let us know in the comments section below.