A homebrew app store for jailbroken PS5s passes 40,000 downloads in its first week

ProsperoStore, which installs apps from the homebrew.page catalogue on a jailbroken PS5, shipped seven alpha releases between 5 and 11 October. GitHub counts 40,648 downloads across them, updates i...

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ProsperoStore, an app store for jailbroken PS5 consoles, has been downloaded 40,648 times from GitHub in the week since its first release. The figure is the sum of the download counters on its seven alpha releases, from the first at 00:43 UTC on 5 October to the latest at 18:09 UTC on 11 October, read from the releases page through GitHub's API at 06:32 UTC on 12 October.

That is downloads, not people. Since its third release on 5 October the store checks for a newer version of itself each time it opens and offers to update, so a console that followed every release could account for seven downloads. The counters do not show how many consoles are behind them.

Two releases took two thirds

The first release drew 2,890 downloads, and the two releases that followed later the same day drew 687 and 916. The fourth, on 6 October, made installing work on firmware 13.40 to 13.60, where a helper the store relies on had not started, and drew 4,285. The next two took most of the week's total: 13,656 for the 7 October release, which stopped app updates from deleting files users had put inside an app's folder, and 13,584 for the 8 October release. That one added a catalogue mirror for networks that block homebrew.page, a debug log, and an option to add a custom catalogue alongside the official one. The 11 October release, with developer pages, "New in the catalog" and "Recently updated" shelves and a News room, had 4,630 downloads by Monday morning.

What it installs

The store is a front end for homebrew.page, which describes itself as a catalogue of 63 native PS5 homebrew apps, games and tools, where "every download comes from the developer's GitHub release and is pinned by SHA-256". ProsperoStore checks each download against that signed catalogue before it installs, updates or removes an app. Its listings include the PS5 port of Dusklight released this weekend and the PS2 emulator PS5SX2.

It is made by BlackBearReloaded, whose repository was created on 2 October and is licensed GPL-3.0. It needs ShadowMountPlus, with version 1.7beta4 recommended on newer firmware, and a payload loader listening on port 9021. The first release notes say it was tested on firmware 6.02 and 12.70, and every release so far is labelled an alpha.

Sources

Image: Gaming World, data from GitHub

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