Popular jailbreak tweak biteSMS just got a new update that introduces a quick compose widget to your iPhone’s Notification Center. The feature promises to be a simple and convenient way to send text messages in a pinch.
Jay Freeman, the creator of Cydia, at JailbreakCon last year.
JailbreakCon, the only convention dedicated solely to the iOS jailbreak community, took place last summer in San Francisco, California. We brought you on-the-ground reporting from the convention floor, including profiles of people like pod2g, the luckiest jailbreak hacker in the world.
Now JailbreakCon is coming to New York City on August 23rd-24th.
In the last week I have jailbroken and then de-jailbrokened an iPad mini, mostly thanks to stupid little glitches that make me think the whole thing will just crash in the middle of something important like a round of Super Stickman Golf 2.
But if you have a hacked iPhone, you might want to keep it hacked fo a little longer, at least until you get to try the amazing Velox, a tweak that lets you use apps as little notification-center-style widgets right there on the home screen.
Chat Heads. They made their grand debut in Facebook Home for Android, and Facebook added them later to its official iOS app. Now they are venturing out of Facebook’s iPhone app and into the rest of iOS, thanks to a jailbreak developer.
There are a number of tweaks for jailbroken iOS devices that add alternative security measures to your lock screen, but Piano Passcode is possibly one of the craziest. Rather than typing a code or drawing a pattern, you have to play it a tune on a set of virtual keys.
I like to keep my iPhone’s lockscreen clean and free of distractions. Jailbreak tweaks that add weather, RSS, and more are useful for many, but the lockscreen can easily start to feel cluttered after awhile.
That’s why I’m excited to present “atom,” a new jailbreak tweak for the lockscreen that replaces the unlock slider with a beautifully subtle app launcher.
Jailbreaking is great for fine tuning the iOS experience. Abstergo is a new and excellent jailbreak tweak that does just that, and it’s available in Cydia now for $2. Developed by Joshua Tucker and Andrew Richardson, Abstergo improves Notification Center by adding some subtle features. It won’t blow you away, but it will make interacting with notifications less annoying—and sometimes that’s all it takes for a tweak to be great.
Earlier this week, we wrote about Grabby, a rad little Cydia tweak that let you extend the lockscreen camera launcher into a quickbar for up to five favorite apps.
Here’s a similar idea. Atom is an upcoming Cydia tweak that is set to be released this weekend which allows you to unlock your iPhone directly to up to six different apps, just by dragging the on-screen ‘locked’ icon to one of six positions.
We’ve all seen those fake iOS devices that are being made in China, but did you know that Apple’s App Store is being cloned there, too? A service called KuaiYong, which means “use quickly” in Chinese, according to MIC Gadget, lets iPhone and iPad users download and install pirated iOS apps without jailbreaking.
The service has been around for almost a year, so how has it gone unnoticed for so long?
Facebook brought its new Chat Heads feature to iPhone earlier this week, but it doesn’t offer quite the same experience as the Android version. The feature is designed to make your Facebook Messenger conversations easy to access from anywhere, but on iOS, it only works when you’re within the Facebook app — which kind of defeats its purpose.
But as is often the case, the jailbreaking community has a solution. A new tweak that allows you to use Chat Heads as Facebook originally intended on iPhone is coming soon to Cydia.
Auxo is one of the best jailbreak tweaks out there, period. It started as an iOS app switcher concept and has since matured into a full-fleged jailbreak tweak that puts Apple’s switcher to shame. Instead of tiny app icons, you can jump between apps by viewing large, card-like tiles. There’s also an enhanced music player and quick access to system settings, like screen brightness and WiFi.
While it works great on the iPhone, I’ve always thought that Auxo was better suited for the iPad’s larger display. The good news is that Auxo will finally be coming to jailbroken iPads everywhere sometime next month. An exact release date and price have not been given yet. Auxo for iPad will be going into private beta testing soon, and I’ll have more to share then.
I don’t know about you, but I find that displaying the battery percentage alongside the battery indicator in the iPhone’s status bar takes up too much room — particularly if you use tweaks that provide status bar symbols for outstanding notifications. I usually use Springtomize to remove the battery indicator altogether, leaving just the percentage.
But a new tweak called Live Battery Indicator gives you the best of both worlds — without taking up too much space.
Grabby, a new tweak from esteemed jailbreak developer Ryan Petrich, allows you to quickly launch your most frequently used apps from your iPhone’s lock screen by extending the functionality of the built-in camera slider. Find out more about how it works and where to download it below.
One thing that we really hope Apple adds to iOS is the ability to toggle certain settings right from the homescreen. There are a number of jailbreak tweaks that let you do it, but we’d love a Cupertino-brewed solution.
Ran Avni has a new iOS 7 concept that solves a lot of the problem with toggles. With his tweak you’d be able to adjust brightness, change songs, turn on Bluetooth or Wifi, and change your device orientation, all from a simple menu on the lockscreen. The UI isn’t perfect, but we’d love it if Apple put something similar to this in iOS 7 so we’d have one less reason to jailbreak.
Auxo, a popular jailbreak tweak that supercharges your multitasking tray, has been updated to version 1.4-2. The latest release adds a number of new toggles, including one for Do Not Disturb, and makes improvements to the flashlight and respring toggles. It also carries a number of bug fixes.
Apple lets you control music playback on your iOS devices from the lock screen, but your options are very limited; you can play or pause tracks, and skip back and forth between them. But if you want to listen to another album, you’ll need to unlock your device and open the Music app to find it.
But not if you have Pluck installed. Pluck is a new tweak for jailbroken iOS devices that lets you access your entire music library from the lock screen.
LockLauncher, a handy tweak that allows you to run apps from the lock screen on jailbroken iPhones, has today been updated to add support for the iPhone 5 and iOS 6. You can download it now from Cydia’s BigBoss repository.
Don't expect to see this running on iOS 6 anytime soon.
There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that jailbreak hackers have exploits saved up for another jailbreak release in the future. The bad news is that we will not be seeing a new jailbreak any time soon — at least until after iOS 7 comes out.
We’ve openly speculated that the Evasi0n jailbreak might be the last public jailbreak now that Apple has closed the security holes that makes evasi0n work, but maybe we spoke too soon: well-known jailbreaker posixninjasays he’s collected enough new exploits in iOS 6.1.3 to patch together another jailbreak.
Existing iPhone 5 handsets already in circulation don’t have this, but it can be enabled on the AT&T and unlocked models. And if your iPhone 5 is jailbroken, you can enable it yourself. Here’s how.
Updating your apps on iOS isn’t hard, but for some reason, I suck at remembering to. There are always about nine update notifications waiting for me in the App Store, and I always think I’ll get around to it in a minute, but never do.
One of the best new reasons to jailbreak though, is an app called Auto App Updater. Like its name says, the app makes it so you never have to think about updating your apps on your iPhone or iPad again.
Samsung’s Android smartphones have this nifty feature that lets you quickly make calls from within contact cards and messages simply by raising the device to your ear. And thanks to a new tweak called RaiseToCall, you can now get the same feature on your jailbroken iPhone.
For years Apple has been playing a game of cat and mouse with jailbreakers. Apple releases a new version of iOS, hackers get busy finding security vulnerabilities to exploit, a new jailbreak comes out utilizing those hard-earned exploits, and Apple fixes the security holes in a new iOS version. The cycle has been happening for years.
A team of hackers called the Evad3rs were responsible for the recent iOS 6 Evasi0n jailbreak, and Apple just released iOS 6.1.3 to patch the related security holes. Of the 6 exploits that were fixed, Apple has publicly credited 4 to the Evad3rs, all of which are chained together to give hackers root access to iOS.
Wish you could do more with Notification Center in iOS 6? Besides the couple of stock widgets Apple includes, there isn’t a lot of functionality to be found. On my iPhone, it usually feels like a waste of space. What if you could compose an email or quickly access your camera alongside notifications?
Jailbreaking allows you to do that and more, thanks to a couple of handy Cydia tweaks.