Installous Is Dead, It's Not Just You
Just a couple days ago, we received the news that that popular pirate app store for iOS, Installous, shut down along with the entire Hackulous team. Hackulous is regarded as one of the biggest names in the iOS jailbreak community, so seeing their doors close is certainly a huge victory for anti-piracy advocates, but that hasn't stopped from other iOS piracy sources from taking Installous' place.
No one knows why the immensely-popular pirate app store shut down without warning, but Hackulous claims that "stagnant" forums and the difficulty in moderating them eventually led to the team quietly shutting it all down. However, we have to assume that there were other factors involved in the shutdown, since we have a hard time believing that the forums for such a popular service were "stagnant" by any means. If anything, the forums could've been booming, and moderators had a hard time keeping up with duties.
Unfortunately, for those who currently have Installous installed on their jailbroken iOS device will no longer be able to access the app at all — it immediately prompts you with a "Installous will now terminate" message, and simply goes back to the iOS home screen, deeming the app completely useless. It's even been removed in the Cydia store, where it will still show up in search results, but will fail to install
SlashGear isn't responsible for users jailbreaking their devices, and you do so at your own risk.
Jailbreakers will no doubt miss Hackulous, and the team's one-stop shop for "cracked" or pirated apps and games on iOS was one of the main reasons that users jailbroke their iOS devices in the first place, but it looks like users will have to pony up that $0.99 for an app or game they would've gotten for free otherwise. Or they can resort to other sources, like Zuesmos and Kuaiyong, both of which don't even require jailbreaking in the first place. But we're guessing that it'll be a long time before we see another pirate app store show up that will impact the iOS jailbreak community the way that Installous did.