Saying Goodbye to Dynastic Repo
Today, we're announcing the end of Dynastic Repo.
TL;DR:
- Dynastic Repo is shutting down next year.
- Your purchases are safe and will continue to be honoured.
- We’re doing everything we can to assure a smooth transition for developers, including the creation of the Dynastic Repo Archival Program.
Continue reading for more details on why and how this transition will work.
Today, we’re announcing the end of Dynastic Repo. We didn’t make this decision lightly but rather after careful deliberation.
What most know as Dynastic started with the 2018 introduction of ShortLook, but we’ve been around for over 5 years now.1 When we first announced ShortLook, we were amazed by the positive response we received. But when it was time to launch ShortLook, we were stunned by the state of hosting platforms for tweak developers, either offensively expensive, poorly-made, or last updated years ago. Refusing to settle, we put our heads down and worked on a new hosting platform. In July 2018, we launched ShortLook in unison with Dynastic Repo.
Almost immediately, developers from all corners of the community were asking to host on Dynastic Repo. We hadn’t intended to open our repository to all. Within a few months, jailbreaks began to include our repo. As we spoke with interested developers, we learned more about their problems — from reverse engineering, to hosting, to business guidance — tweak developers had few good options; everything seemed like a compromise.
We redefined Dynastic with a new mission: to make tweak developers’ lives easier. And in the years we’ve been at it, we’re proud to have made an impact — from saving developers’ countless hours of work to saving them from tens of thousands of dollars of debt. Really: we’ve heard from developers who were able to make rent because of our platform. Others were able to pay their tuition, entirely avoiding student loans. We are immensely grateful to have played such an important role in these people’s lives.
So, why?
As mentioned earlier, this wasn’t an easy decision, but after much consideration it became clear what we had to do.
Presently, we don’t believe that Dynastic Repo has a viable future. The jailbreaking community continues to shrink while iOS advances. As jailbreakers, this saddens us greatly. We would run Dynastic Repo forever if we could, but we can’t — it isn’t cheap to run. At the same time, the shrinking community also complicates our mission of making developers’ lives easier; there are fewer and fewer to help. We believe there are other opportunities where we could have an impact for more developers. Finally, our team is comprised entirely of young adults starting their careers. We’re struggling to split our time between university, our full-time jobs, and Dynastic. We don’t want to leave Dynastic Repo in a state of disrepair, as many past repos have been.
With these concerns in mind, we considered finding a new owner for Dynastic Repo, but at this moment, we don’t currently believe that any competitors share our vision (but we’re open to chat).
How?
While shutting down, we want to make sure we do so with the utmost care and respect for jailbreakers and developers. Here’s how we plan to do that:
- Starting in March 2021, while we considered our options, we stopped accepting new developers.
- Today, we’re notifying all developers currently using Dynastic Repo about the change and offering them our support with moving to a new repository. We’re also informing them about the Dynastic Repo Archival Program (more below).
- On October 31, 2021, we will stop accepting updates for existing tweaks, apart from critical bug fixes.
- On December 31, 2021, Dynastic will stop accepting purchases for paid packages. Customers will still be able to access their products.
- On January 31, 2022, developers will no longer have access to the Dynastic Repo Developer Portal as we prepare for archival.
- On March 31, 2022, Dynastic Repo will become a read-only archive of packages participating in the Dynastic Repo Archival Program. This is the deadline for paid packages to move to another repository.
- Once we are legally able to, we will begin removing repo customer data we hold.
Dynastic Repo Archival Program
We don’t want this to cause people’s hard work to disappear from the internet, and we understand how important repositories are to the jailbreaking community. The Dynastic Repo Archival Program is our commitment to continue hosting existing free packages for the next 7 years.
By default, free packages will be automatically enrolled in this program. Paid packages will need to opt-in. If you’re a developer, you will be receiving an email with further details.
Dynastic’s tweaks, including ShortLook, will be opting into the Dynastic Repo Archival Program, becoming freely available on March 31, 2022.
What’s next?
While we don’t have any concrete plans to share right now, if you want to keep in touch, follow us on Twitter: @aydenpanhuyzen, @jamiebishop123, @OfficialHoSay.
As sad this moment is for us, we’re happy that we’re able to make this decision with Dynastic in a relatively good place; while it’s still something to be proud of. We hope that you’ll be there for whatever we do next.
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