Comex’s Cydia Substrate alternative ‘Substitute’ is direct competition to Sourik’s Cydia Substrate
Comex of Jailbreakme is working of a open source Cydia Substrate alternative known as of now as ‘Substitute.’
Legendary hacker and iOS jailbreak developer, Comex is reportedly working in association with iMods, a Cydia alternative, to develop a Mobile (Cydia) Substrate replacement called Substitute.  Comex and iMod team have reportedly completed the ‘Substitute’ which is focused on providing the code injection platform for hooking advanced functionality into apps and bypassing OEM restrictions on the device. However it is not fully functional and deployable as it lacks some safety features like Safe Mode which is found in Cydia’s Mobile Substrate according to iDownloadBlog
Comex has cited a three reasons for joining up for the project with iMod’s, the prime reason he said,
“The way I see it, jailbreaking is fundamentally about taking something closed and fixed and opening it up to hacking and modification: perhaps allowing a mess to be made, but quite possibly ending up with something unique and different. This ideal of openness is very similar to that of free software, and I therefore believe that it’s in the spirit of jailbreaking to make as much low-level stuff open as possible, both for inspection and modification by curious users.”
Competition vs Community
Jay Freeman aka ‘Saurik’ the developer behind Cydia has not taken kindly to this new initiative by Comex and iMods. In a blog post called Competition vs Community, Saurik notes that,
“I am not “just a storefront”. However, if you compete with me on the storefront, you not only indirectly affect my interest to keep working in the community, but you directly affect my ability to spend time doing so… Because if you are, you aren’t just picking a fight, you are walking into one you can’t win: where on the one side is losing quickly, and the other side is still losing, it’s just losing a little bit later, after the infrastructure you are relying on crumbles and key parts of the developer and support community (first- and third- party) disappear.”
Substitute will be a direct competition to the Cydia substrate and that may ignite some fire between both the legends.  iMods which came with a Cydia alternative has not been that particularly successful as of now. The iMods team released a trailer late last year highlighting the UI of their Cydia alternative. The same had been hailed has visually appealing by jailbreak iOS users but the shipping to the last man is a huge logistics problem which they havent been able to break so far.
