zebra - Network

Update: The Reddit news carousel will be disabled for the foreseeable future, as Reddit has chosen not to respond to the protests (other...

Update: The Reddit news carousel will be disabled for the foreseeable future, as Reddit has chosen not to respond to the protests (other than in a company-wide email saying it’ll blow over and no changes will be made), and therefore, /r/jailbreak has announced that they will remain closed.

We’re sad that we can’t continue offering this feature, but no other source of community news currently exists. For the time being, our only option is to hide the carousel.

Announcement and slight rant about Reddit API changesIn solidarity with developers of Reddit clients and other tools that make use of the...

Announcement and slight rant about Reddit API changes

In solidarity with developers of Reddit clients and other tools that make use of the Reddit API, Zebra is planning to follow in the spirit of subreddits planning to go dark on the 12th and 13th of this month.

The news carousel you see at the top of Zebra’s Changes tab uses the Reddit API to query the top posts of the past 7 days. Fortunately, Zebra’s use of the API will fit within their extremely low limit of 100 requests per minute on the free tier (Zebra only makes one request every hour), but we’re still disappointed about this situation. As such, we’ve pinned /r/jailbreak’s announcement about the change to the front of the carousel, and on the 12th and 13th, the only item you’ll see in the carousel is this post.

I know, it’s annoying. But there’s really not much we can do here, other than protest through the few methods we have available to us. After all, we’re up against a corporation whose founders and other current shareholders are about to become very wealthy - even despite how bad the market has been in 2023, even despite being co-founded by a current venture capitalist and briefly being run by the current CEO of OpenAI, even despite being sold to the media giant Condé Nast a year after founding, even despite the content being produced for them for free, even despite the moderation being dealt with for them for free, even despite eating the supposed exorbitant API costs for 15+ years, enough just wasn’t enough, and they have to push even further.

If you’re out of the loop on what this is, the Snazzy Labs interview with Christian Selig of Apollo is an insightful watch. TLDW: Reddit is about to go public, they’re looking for ways they can trim costs and make the company more appealing to their new investors, it’s widely assumed AI startups are churning through Reddit for data to harvest for their models, and therefore they’ve decided turning the API into a paid product much like Twitter did recently is the way to go. Unfortunately, they’ve left developers of community Reddit projects in the dark of all that’s going on with this, in one case straight up telling those apps that they cost them tons of money, refusing to provide any actionable information to help those developers reduce the expenses Reddit is claiming they rack up. Reddit is asking developers of such projects to pay what, on the highest scale, works out to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. This is clearly out of reach for projects that have pretty low yearly subscriptions, or are even totally free. Asking for a reasonable fee per user would make sense - asking for tens of thousands really doesn’t. It’s designed to price out the community projects so they’re forced to shut down.

For more information on the entire situation, take a look at this infographic, media coverage, and the Reddark website.

Updated 2023-06-12 with more recent links to further info

Zebra 1.1.32 fixes a bunch of bugs, including for rootful releases showing up as an update on rootless jailbreaks....

Zebra 1.1.32 fixes a bunch of bugs, including for rootful releases showing up as an update on rootless jailbreaks. https://github.com/zbrateam/Zebra/releases/tag/v1.1.32

Zebra is back! We just released Zebra 1.1.31, which has a stack of improvements across the app. It’s better than ever for rootless, and...

Zebra is back! We just released Zebra 1.1.31, which has a stack of improvements across the app. It’s better than ever for rootless, and support for rootful jailbreaks is improved.

It now filters incompatible packages (rootful vs rootless) by default, so you won’t be disappointed when a package turns out to be incompatible, and tons of bugs have been fixed.

https://github.com/zbrateam/Zebra/discussions/2037

I think everyone figured out this was the case anyway, but based on Sileo deciding to end support for XinaA15, we’re going to clarify that...

I think everyone figured out this was the case anyway, but based on Sileo deciding to end support for XinaA15, we’re going to clarify that Zebra is no longer planning to support it.

We’re extremely grateful for Xina’s work, and the semi-rootless nature of XinaA15 helped start pushing tweak developers onto the road to “proper” rootless. Sadly, to trick rootful binaries into working rootlessly involves a bunch of hacks, and trying to make that work with every package was always going to be a challenge. There were quite some difficulties working around the weird edge cases, even in the latest version of XinaA15, after many of us worked with Xina to get bugs fixed.

One of the most broken components was APT/dpkg, which weren’t correctly compiled for semi-rootless. It was @anamy’s incredible work that allowed XinaA15 to have a working package manager at all, even if it wasn’t perfect.

Now, we have palera1n and Fugu15 Max taking us to the next stage of rootless jailbreaks, so this is the extremely rare time that it seems right to stop supporting a specific jailbreak.

“Proper” rootless is a pain in the butt, we know. Not everything is updated yet, we know. But it’s worth the trouble for a healthier package ecosystem.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk. Zebra 1.1.31 bugfix update coming shortly by the way.

Hello! Welcome to Zebra on Mastodon! Follow us for updates on your favorite package manager for iOS 🦓We’re hard at work on Zebra 2. Get...

Hello! Welcome to Zebra on Mastodon! Follow us for updates on your favorite package manager for iOS 🦓

We’re hard at work on Zebra 2. Get a sneak peek at our redesign concept here: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2022/07/17/zebra-package-manager-redesign-version-2/