The news of Hackulous shutting down was met with mixed reactions- some felt that it was the right thing to do while others felt it was a let down for the jailbreak community.
If you are not familiar with Hackulous, it was a very popular Cydia source for Jailbroken iOS devices- its main benefit was access to Installous which served as a source for hacked iOS apps. This source allowed you to download paid iOS apps for free! It was the nature of the service offered by Hackulous that caused the mixed reaction from the public.
People who strongly opposed piracy were happy that Hackulous decided to close down. Their main argument is that the economy for mobile apps is stil in its infancy and piracy will only kill the small developers. They saw Hackulous as hurting the small developers and only making it harder for them to compete against big names such as Rovio, Imangi, EA etc.
The other side of the fence felt they have been betrayed by the Jailbreak community. Some people said that Jailbreak was about complete mobile freedom and they felt limiting their ability to access apps as a betrayal.
If you ask me- I am proud Hackulous made the right decision to shut-down and I had my iOS jailbroken for a very long time. To me, Jailbreak is not about Piracy- if you are into jailbreaking for the sole purpose of getting paid apps for free, then you are missing the whole point of Jailbreak. Getting my iphone Jailbroken was about User Interface Customization- being able to do things on my iPhone that the base OS does not allow me to do. I was into Jailbreaking mainly for the tweaks offered both paid and free. I will admit, I did use Installous and did install some hacked apps but it wasn’t long until the limitations became too annoying.
Although Installous gave you access to hacked apps it does not automatically support updates to the app. Say you downloaded EA’s Need for Speed– Most Wanted thru Installous. It gets installed like any other app on you iphone and you play it like you purchased it legitimately. The issue starts when the developer starts updating the app. If you downloaded your app thru Installous you can only update it thru Installous. This process becomes annoying for three reasons: 1. The updates are not seeded right away as it depends on how soon a hacked version can be made available, 2. When you update the app, it downloads the entire app with the updated version! and 3. Most sources for the hacked apps bring you to some bogus website that is full of annoying banner ads. These things made me decide to just ditch Installous altogether.
At the end of the day, the reaction from people saying the Jailbreak community died with Hackulous shutting down completely missed the point of a Jailbreak. It still remains to be seen how it affects the adoption of Jailbreaks from iOS users- we should soon see data if there was a big spike in OS 6.0 adoption. Most devices Jailbroken have remained on OS 5+ because OS 6 can only be jailbroken thru the tethered method (a method I personally do not like) and only for select iOS devices. If the Hackulous shutdown did cause people to abandon Jailbreak then we should see a lot of them update to the most recent iOS version.
If you are one of the people who still want your doze of free apps, I suggest doing it the right way. Check out AppsFire– this is a great app that gives you access to paid apps that are currently being offered at a deep discount or have been dropped to zero. You can also check out App of the Day– this app gives you one free app every 24 hrs.
How about you? Do you Jailbreak your iOS device for the hacked apps or for the tweaks?
pedes3antech 
