RiPDev

From The Apple Wiki

RiPDev (Russian iPhone Developers) was a popular group of iPhone software developers, created in 2007 by Slava Karpenko aka @slavikus. Their first product was a free Russian Keyboard, as part of the commercial Russian Project for iPhone OS 1.x.x. Later RiPDev made many very useful applications such as 'Hood,' an SBSettings alternative. They made Icy, a popular APT package installer. As of iOS 4, most of their iOS projects no longer work.

They made an application called InstallerApp that allowed users to install jailbroken apps on a device via the computer. It worked for some time than slowly faded away since not many users wanted to pay for it. It was a very well made application and soon enough RipDev gave up on the project. They have several language packages and most of their software had language options for over 30 languages.

RiPDev was heavily criticised by well-known Russian blogger Eldar Murtazin for illegal enterprise since they never paid any taxes for their revenues.

The team was dismissed in the late 2009, when it became obvious that it had no working business model.

Icy

Icy is a lightweight APT package installer that was both themeable and produced in over 30 languages. It works perfectly on 2.x-3.1.2, and it is being updated by many for iOS 4. Icy was a very advanced installer but had its issues. RiPDev tried to reinvent APT, losing a lot of popular features and made the repository owners have to do a lot more work then repository owners would have for Cydia. Saurik explained this when Icy was released some time back. Since RipDev closed their business, they made Icy open source.

The WeAmDev team picked up the Icy project, releasing the 2.0.1 version featuring iOS 4 multitasking support and the improved Icy 2.1.

Hood

Hood was an alternative to SBSettings. The arrow on the bottom of the window, when clicked would bring up a process list were you can kill user processes, a long with a wifi on-off toggle, Bluetooth on-off, Edge on-off and the last button was customizable to either close the current application, or respring. RipDev recently made Hood Open Source

InstallerApp

InstallerApp was said to be the 'iTunes for jailbreakers'. It allowed users to install apps from repositories, download, and install immediately which was a much better solution then having to decide between Cydia and Installer.app (Predecessor to Icy). Sadly this application took a lot of work to make true, and never really became a hit in the community. The Russian iPhone Developers never released the source to this application since users had to pay for it. While the app had many features, one of the main uses was the Pusher jailbreak which asked you to put your device into DFU mode, then uploaded the RipDev application titled Pusher to your device, and from there would install all of your applications that you downloaded.

i2Reader Pro

Apple details it as an innovative, award winning eBook reader. Development of app continued by one of former RiPDev members under Unsanity brand. It is now in the App Store and is still a very successful eBook reader to this day.

iPref

iPref [Archived 2012-01-18 at the Wayback Machine] was a Preferans card game on the App Store using an early proprietary anti-piracy mechanism called Kali. There was a controversy on whether game algorithms were stolen from the OpenPref project without permission of its maintainer.

Kate

Kate, originally named Caterpillar, is a package of unique tools and tweaks for your iDevice. There were individual packages that you could install that could give you more customization options geared towards making your iDevice way more productive and entertaining. There were business tools, quick contact searches, system font replacements, lockscreen calendar, and a smart dialer.

More

RipDev had made several more amazing projects and several of them have taken on new lives in the App Store such as their famous Pool game. RipDev is no longer making products or supporting the ones they have. RipDev's repo closed around 1 October 2010 and the RussianApple repository has their products stored on their repository at http://repo.russianapple.ru [Archived 2010-10-16 at the Wayback Machine]. Nevertheless, many of these products do not work on iOS 4 or above.