The end..
2024 Update: Lima has been open sourced (MIT)
We have decided to open source the Lima project for the following reasons:
- Usability. Lima's source code is 11 years old at best, most of it 12 or 13 years. When Lima was ended it was not open sourced because there had already been countless ripoffs that were quite subpar. None of them matched the security of Lima Installer and none of them ever came close in terms of UX and UI. Now that the code is 11 years old on average, it can simply not be used anymore without requiring an extensive rewrite. Note that the last version of Lima still had some issues with regards to dependencies.
- Educational. Lima accomplished something quite interesting for its time. It ran off a central server, rather than on device. Source refreshing was done on the master server, rather than on the users device. This meant the Reloading Data messages of those days were history for people using Lima. Some people might be interested to see how Lima worked, and what security measures were taken back in the day.
- Legacy. Lima was a great project. Initially thought to be vapourware, Lima managed to accomplish what many thought was not feasible. Over 32 thousand people signed up to test the beta, and over 10 thousand actually did. While Lima itself is dead, it would be a shame if it completely disappeared. Publishing the source code under the MIT license will keep Lima's legacy alive, even if it's just a little.
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.
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 costs: Lima already had a large amount of signsups for the beta testing program, if it would go public the amount of users would even become bigger. As Lima gets more users to server costs go up, to cover those server costs Lima would have to start displaying allot of ads all over the website which would ruin the user experience.
- The development: Finding reliable developers to work on the Lima project has proven to be a hard task, due to a lack of developers the project has made little progress over the past two years
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:
- Lima is NOT a jailbreak and also never was a jailbreak. From the beginning on Lima has required a jailbroken device to work.
- Not everyone who registered for a beta invite got one, but at least 10.000 people did get one. We did send out a significant amount of beta testing invites in our opinion.
- We are not going to make a complete list of all of them, but feel free to submit your own misconceptions to us to be added here.
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:
- All the Lima beta testers for doing an awesome job testing Lima
- All the people that showed their interest in Lima, motivating us to work on it
- All the blogs that reviewed Lima
- Our main webhosting partner FlipHost for providing Lima's server power. Send them some cookies! (or buy webhosting from them)
- All the real iPhone hackers who made the jailbreaks required for Lima to work. (So NOT the kids who have "iPhone hacker" or "security researcher" in their twitter bio)
- The APT package repositories (BigBoss, ModMyi and Saurik) for hosting thousands of packages while not attempting to block Lima.
- Anyone else who we forgot to mention here.
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