Is it a bad idea to have both Cydia and Icy installed on your iPhone 3G?? The answer is NO

For over 6 months now I have stumbbled upon many many posts on forums and blogs regarding people recommending other people not to run two of the Debian repo installers: Cydia and Icy. I cannot count the ways how many times I have been saved by having the 2nd Installer on my phone when Cydia would constantly crash and prevent me from getting any updates and new apps. (skip to the middle if you dont want to read a short intro below about the 3 installers)

If you do not know, Cydia and ICY are kinda like the original App Store created but in order to be able to use it..well.. you have to Jailbreak your phone. I jailbroke my phone about a month and a half after I got it.

To jailbreak my 3G, with 3.0 firmware i used a hacked firmware and the process was a lot more compliacted back then then it is now since the release of blackra1n. Very easy to use program which litteraly took less than a minute to jailbreak my phone. Once the jailbreak completes, your phone will have a new icon on the home screen “blackrai1n”. Clicking that will enable to install your choice of Installer for jailbroken apps - Cydia, ICY, and Rock.

Cydia is the original program which almost everyone has used or still uses every day. ICY is an alternative to Cydia witch a little “what supposed to be” cooler interface.

App Rock ..well i tried it once, and wasn’t too impressed because most of the apps on it even tho were jailbroken…you still had to pay for so…. i uninstalled that one almost as soon as i installed it.

SO ANYWAY’s I kinda got side tracked. Since all of us have Cydia on our Jailbroken phones (you would be a fool to remove it) launch it and search for and install ICY. I have both of them currently running on my 3G with 3.1.3 firmware. ( do not upgrade to 3.1.3 firmware because if you do..you won’t be able to jailbreak your phone).

After installing ICY you will have to manually add all of the sources from Cydia which you have previously added. So far i haven’t found an easier way or an alternative and if you have 10s of 10s of sources…well it might be a pain in the ass. It might take a while to update all of the sources in ICY but when done you will notice that it is very similar to Cydia in many ways and it actually performs a lot better. On my phone ICY runs a lot quicker and updates a lot faster than Cydia. Even installing and uninstalling applications in general is A LOT faster than via Cydia because Cydia reloads a lot of data after installation which refreshes and reloads the list of your packages, installed applications etc.

On my phone installing/uninstalling apps using Cydia and then removing them from ICY works perfectly and vice versa but it might just be me so try it at your own risk by installing/uninstalling a small application. Having ICY and being able to use it when Cydia failed was a lifesaver to me on many occasions, including just a recent one about 2 days ago- Cydia was updating core Cydia components when I guess it failed and/or crashed half way leaving some components updated, some uninstalled, and some possibly corrupted. When I attempted to launch Cydia again it would just show up say “loading data” and crash within 5 seconds and screen would go back to Springboard.

After doing some reasearch online i found a way by typing commands in MobileTerminal app…which I didn’t have and Since it was a jailbroken app..i could only get it from Cydia as per those sites. All i did was…start ICY, get the app, write the code given on the site and test if Cydia would work. It did!. No pain no aggrivattion. It would probably have taken me another couple of days to find a way to fix it without having that app or who knows ..maybe i would end up loosing all my repos, packages and sources.