Last night I updated Cydia to the latest version, in order to access paid content. Jay Freeman (saurik) has developed the latest version of Cydia to take on Apple’s App Store directly. Until now very few apps on Cydia cost money, and if they did, the payment system was different between each app. Now with a unified system of payment through Amazon Payments (PayPal support coming soon), developers can now get return on their hard work.

Freeman launched the new store with an app of his own, Cyntact. This simple app displays contacts’ pictures in any contact listing, somewhat similar to the Facebook app’s friend listing. He has listed the app at $1, but plans to continue developing free apps for the iPhone, and this app is more to demonstrate the Cydia Store.

The actually process was, lets say, far from painless. You must first log into either Facebook or Google, and link your account to Cydia, then payment through Amazon Payments isn’t ideal. I went through several screens to purchase just one app. Granted some of those steps, like linking my Facebook account won’t have to be done again, but it’s a far cry from Apple’s App Store, but the important thing is, it works! I then got confirmation on my screen saying my purchase had been approved and I could proceed to download Cyntact, which works very well, and is certainly worth $1.

I do however have concerns. I’ve bought jailbreak apps before, MySMS, SwirllyMMS and iRealSMS to name a few, and the experience hasn’t been great. I haven’t had a single problem with SwirllyMMS, and it was well worth the money, however I feel completely ripped off by iRealSMS, which wouldn’t even work at first, and now just runs appallingly slow, and freezes randomly. MySMS falls somewhere in between, crashing sometime in low signal. Another worry is that Cydia will become full of $1 farting apps or such. Hopefully, the jailbreak community will have a bit more cop on than official developers, and make good use of this payment system.

All in all, it needs a little bit of work, but at the moment it just works, which is all you really need. I hope to see some good unapproved apps in the future.