The end..


2024 Update: Lima has been open sourced (MIT)

We have decided to open source the Lima project for the following reasons:

While Lima will soon be open source under the MIT license, we strongly advice against using it for a browser based Cydia alternative, and for several reasons. The biggest being that when Lima was started, Cydia was quite slow and was the only player in town. Today however, Cydia is much faster, and reliable than Lima was. The second reason is that web based applications will by design always be less good than native applications (Such as Cydia). While Lima had over 30.000 signups, it eventually died because there just wasn't enough interested in a browser based Cydia alternative to justify the time and money spent on it. This is even more true in 2024. Everything is open source. Thank you for supporting Lima all those years ago. Here is the rest of the goodbye post, untouched since 2013.

More information on Lima: iDownloadBlog Article & Video

Source code: https://github.com/AppTapp/Lima-Installer/

We know the 12 year old code is horrible, you don't need to tell us.

Here is the official goodbye message from 2013.



A summary

We have decided to retire the Lima project as of today for the following reasons:

The full story

We started Lima over 2 years ago as a cool new concept, easy quick app installations from the web browser. Since then it has grown out to a functional browser based centralised APT front end for jailbroken iOS devices. From the beginning there has been allot of interest for the Lima project as it seemed to work much faster and easier than the existing alternative named Cydia. The special thing about Lima was that the indexing of packages happened at a central location rather than on your device itself.

Lima was developed by students with busy schedules, that was noticable during the past 2 years. You would hear allot about Lima for a week and then you wouldn't hear anything for a few months; Lima's first flaw. There were a multiple parties interested in helping with the development of Lima, but in the end their main goals were either, stealing Lima's source code, making Lima a commercial money making monster or getting early beta access. Luckily none of these parties ever got a chance to "help with the development".

So now 2 years later, it's time to remind ourselves that Lima started as an experiment and that it is time for it to end.

Common misconceptions

There are a couple misconceptions about Lima which I would like to straighten out. So here are the facts:

F.A.Q.

You were not the only one requesting a beta testing invite, if we would've sent everyone a beta invite instantly then we might as have made it public.
The simple fact is: it will get stolen. In the past 2 years I've already seen 10 different parties attempting to clone Lima. (iDebstore, iEverythingStore, iOnlineStore, fr0zeninstaller,etc, I am sorry if I forgot to give your fabulous Lima rip off attention in this post) We are not waiting for 10 other people to try the same thing. If people start using the source code to make their own installer they might try to circumvent Lima's complicated security features putting their users at risk. Another reason is that Lima's code isn't exactly "plug-and-play" code. It needs quite a bit of set up to get it working properly.
The possibilities are endless. There were plans for things like "Install with Lima" buttons which Jailbreak websites could add on their tweak review pages. Also Lima accounts would've been a big thing. Including automated backups, personalised repositories and the ability to disable certain categories in Lima. Rating and comments on packages were on the ideas list too. Suggestions on what to install based on your installation history, just like what the App Store has. OTA installations, using your desktop browser to push a few packages to your phone. OTA general package management, remove that one package which is causing a repsring loop using your desktop browser. Lima store/Cydia Store integration. All of this of course can not be done when there are not enough developers to work on it.
This is a long story, if you want to hear it, then contact me on IRC.
Just send a tweet to @codedit and then it will get added to this list.
Yes, all support emails will still be answered. Except for the emails asking for beta testing invites. If you wrote your email in arabic, swahili, spanish, capslock or other exotic languages, I am afraid I will also have to disappoint you. Same applies to all the empty "sent from my iphone" emails.

Thanks

We would like to thank the following:


So that was it, don't be sad. more awesomeness is likely to come in the future. (We will skip the beta testing and show-off period).
- The Lima Installer Team
© Lima Installer Team, 2011-2013