Apple Thoughts: Cydia Looking to Introduce Paid Store

"Cydia has been the hub of the iPhone gray market for some time now, but developer Jay Freeman is planning on turning the jailbroken app manager into a questionably licit competitor to the App Store. Converting Cydia into a proper application store won't be complicated, and more or less amounts to Freeman adding a centralized payment service to the software. His competitive ambitions, though, aren't so subtle: He told the WSJ that "the overworking goal is to provide choice" and that he plans on match or beat Apple's commission for downloaded apps."

Sounds like a good idea. Not that I'll ever see it, of course, because I refuse to jailbreak my iPhone, but if you're into that sort of thing, this might be the door that independent developers have been waiting to open up forever. No more approval process, no more restrictive standards about what an app can do, and no more denied apps. From a developer standpoint it's a big win.