So there’s been a lot of buzz of the last few days about Icy, a new project from RipDev. Icy uses the same repositories as Cydia, but makes use of sqlite and libcurl instead of APT. The concept is there, but is it ready, in first-release form, to completely replace Cydia on my iPhone?
Yes, it has a stunning interface, it’s blazingly fast, and the animation that goes with package installations is beautiful, but it falls short in several ways.
Previews: One of the best features of Cydia – most package/theme authors include screenshots of their works behind a More Info or Screenshot link. Icy, for whatever reason, doesn’t parse these links making it impossible to see what you’re downloading. You also don’t get any information about the package that isn’t in the first page summary.
Changes: One of my favourite features of Cydia is the Changes tab, which lets you see new packages that have been added since you last launched the app. This feature makes it much easier to browse themes, especially if you have multiple repositories added – without it, the task of sorting though 1,200+ packages in one category to determine which ones you’ve already seen is a major task.
Category Listings: For a first release, Icy ships with a major bug – some users, myself included, were met with an empty categories tab on the first launch. For some people, restarting the phone fixed it, but in my case the only thing that works to get the categories to appear is to refresh the sources list multiple times. I had to do this each time I opened the app.
Seach: Icy’s package searching leaves a lot to be desired. A search for ‘Winterboard’ in Cydia results in a plethora of themes, whereas Icy returns no results as of my last half-dozen attempts.
So the final verdict? Icy is a nice attempt at replacing Cydia, but it still has a long ways to go. Cydia may take a very long time to load up, but it’s still tops in my book.
Update: Icy v1.1 was released today, and it appears to taken care of almost all of my concerns! The categories issue seems to be resolved, and there’s now a blue arrow on the package description page that take you to the package description page you see in Cydia, with links to screenshots, more info, et al…. The only thing that doesn’t seem to work is the Recent Packages in the Categories list (the equivalent to ‘Changes’ in Cydia), but with any luck that will be resolved shortly. Once the next version is out, I’ll do a full review.
