Cydia Gets an Update and Becomes Much Faster

Cydia. Love it or hate it, it’s one of the pillars of the jailbreak community. When Cydia acquired Rock a few months ago, Saurik made the promise that he would work on improving Cydia’s speed, which, let’s be honest, leaves a lot to be desired.

So we knew for a while that it was being worked on by Saurik and Chpwn, but with the release of the recent jailbreak for iOS 4.2.1, we’ve had a taste of where Cydia is going, and I like that a lot.

While the changes in the new release of Cydia aren’t much “esthetically visible” as most of it happens under the hood, if you have the new Cydia on your iPhone, you must have noticed some speed improvement… 

Saurik on the updated Cydia:

Some of my long term performance plans are ‘hitting pay dirt’, and Cydia is much faster than it was before; that said, it isn’t done yet: there’s one more thing that I think is going to make a huge difference that isn’t even in there yet but should be for the final release.

And fast it is! While still below what you’d expect from the one and only jailbreak installer, it’s really exciting to see the improvements. Saurik provided a list of changes made to the new Cydia:

  • reduced loading changes time
  • section remapping optimizations
  • faster reloading data
  • faster, native search
  • uses public SDK classes whenever possible
  • rewritten, faster web views with zooming support
  • changes badge works again
  • more stable webviews (no crashes when queueing)
  • redesigned settings page
  • redesigned stashing page
  • faster scrolling of table views
  • bug fixes
  • ads no longer break the package views until restart
  • much better queueing UI
  • stabler refreshing bar

There is more to come, and I can’t wait to see where it’s going.

Want to get the new and improved Cydia. Here is a tutorial on how to do it.

Do you have the new Cydia installed on your iPhone? If so, have you noticed any difference?