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Anyone daily driving a jailbroken iPhone?
I know the scene is in a rut right now with iOS 16 having pretty much no hope (and with iOS 17 right around the corner), but I wanted to see if anyone else is using a jailbroken iPhone (or any other device) on a day to day.
If you are, drop your device, version and tweak list, I wanna add some new tweaks to my collection! My favs at the moment are Jellyfish (LS clock replacer), Saw (removes space at the bottom of the screen) and Ampere (iOS 16 style battery)
I'm currently on iOS 14 with an iPhone SE (2016). I'm running a headless checkra1n (no Cydia, no Zebra, no Sileo, only
apt-getanddpkg) jailbreak.My tweak list ist very boring. No visual changes, to the OS:
With the jailbreak on it, I won't leave this device anytime soon. Except for the bad battery and Apple's planned obsolescence this is my perfect mobile phone. Compact enough, unobstrusive software, and a bunch of freedom thanks to checkra1n, and pretty cheap to repair. I recently put in a new Apple OEM battery and a cheap but good screen, and I'd do it again if necessary.
I don’t think think it is particularly fair against apple of all companies. They have their fair share of problems, but the longevity of their devices is not one of them. Could you expand on what you mean?
If you happen to mean the controversial “speed got nerfed” story, that was more about a very badly communicated, but well-intentioned change to prevent phones with older batteries from hard rebooting out of nowhere due to its peak consumption being higher than the voltage that could be provided by the battery.
Otherwise, they have a really excellent track record of keeping devices running as long as feasible, they often end up having a second/third life as well.
I'm totally with you on Apple keeping the devices functional for quite a long time, the iPhone SE got an official lifetime of six years after all. I'm more complaining about Apple having a tight grip on their own devices and ecosystem. That's to the point of when you want to use an iPhone for longer than Apple intends, you will have a hard time. There's no way you can install any aftermarket software on it, Apps will not install, downgrades are not possible. You can't even use the device for web browsing as there's no way to install a recent browser, even if the device itself would be hardware and OS wise totally capable to do so.
Sorry for keeping this answer short, this discussion has been led extensively elsewhere. This is just to give you an insight into why I still accuse Apple of planned obsolescence.
Wow, that's commitment. What "utility apps" do you use, and how is the performance with powercuff throttling?
I'm using powercuff on medium throtttling, and the general OS performance is surprisingly okay. When navigating home screens, or scrolling through native apps I don't notice any lags or stutters. Apps do take their time starting up, and overloaded websites or apps written without performance optimization in mind are stuttering quite a bit.
Regarding my utility apps: I've been looking for a nice and minimal task time tracking app. After searching for a few days without any remotely satisfying results, I eventually gave up and wrote my own. If anyone's interested, I'd be happy to share the code. Be careful though, I'm not a professional programmer, and the code is less than straight forward.
The other utility app is just a small tracker for how much of the electricity on my local grid is coming from regenerative sources. It was a fun project for a very specific purpose. Lots of bad code practice, though, so I won't be sharing that project publicly.
What is the state of jailbreaking? I did it with an iPhone 4 back in the day, but it seems like apple has gotten better at preventing jailbreaks with faster updates. How far back do you have to go to jailbreak an iPhone nowadays?
It's not great, but I don't think it's so bad that the scene is "dead". Most iPhones can only be jailbroken on iOS 15.4.1 at the latest, with a few very old systems working up to iOS 16.0. Unfortunately, most of those "very old systems" won't be supported when iOS 17 drops, and the iOS 15 jailbreaks are "rootlesss" (don't have access to the root filesystem). The other issue with "going back" is that it's pretty much impossible to downgrade versions now. AFAIK One of the requirements to downgrade got updated with iOS 16, making every version below it 100% impossible.
I forgot mention that I’m rocking an XS on iOS 14.3, using Taurine.
I haven't used a jailbroken iPhone in more than a decade. Once Apple started making it difficult to jailbreak, it wasn't worth it. Waiting a month or two for a jailbreak to come out after a new iOS release was doable, but then it became a year or two and only if you had an older phone. It just wasn't worth it.
They also started adding a lot of the more basic tweaks to iOS proper (folders, homescreen backgrounds, background processing), it just wasn't worth the effort anymore.
I remember loving having folders, a custom wallpaper on my home screen and all sorts of other small tweaks. For years I used Google Voice as my primary number and had a pair of tweaks installed that let me use the default dialer and messages app to make calls and send texts via GV.
I haven't been jailbroken since I moved to a 12 mini -- but EQE (a system-wide equalizer) and Amber (orange-LED-only flashlight) were my favorites. I really liked shrinking icons and adjusting the spacing --- 5x8 or whatever was nice.
I miss being jailbroken. checkra1n was/is amazing.
Sadly, no. My ideal phone (or, rather, the one I've hated least) was a jailbroken iphone 6s—they just got worse from there in nearly every respect. Except for one crucially important one: battery. That phone's battery was so anemic, and it degraded so quickly (hence replacing it would have been too meagre a stopgap), that at some point using it stopped being a conscionable choice. So, a few months ago, I finally caved and picked up an iphone 13 mini.
And thought about jailbreaking. What did I actually do with the jailbreak?
pirate spotify; I can afford to pay for it now
ad-free youtube app; I don't watch much youtube anyway
command line shell I can use for basic tasks and to ssh into things; served well enough by the app store app 'a-shell'
some other miscellaneous bits and bobs I can't even remember—who cares
Of course I would prefer to have unrestricted root access. But the combination of hassle, limited practical benefit, and security implications means I don't.
I used to run a rooted android phone couple of years ago (I'm guessing up until 2018). However, I really use banking apps a lot, and the cat and mouse game of tricking your banking app in believing the device is not rooted got me finally moving away from rooting. So I'm really interested in knowing if things got better or worse since then (I'm guessing worse), and if anyone found a solution particularly for banking apps? The question is pretty much regardless the OS, just interested to know the lay of the land currently.
I find the whole concept fascinating. Why not just get an android?
This topic is supposed to be for discussing iOS jailbreaking, I don't know if this is really relevant. Everyone has their own preferences. There are valid reasons for preferring either OS.
I guess what I’m wondering is what those reasons could be. Especially in light of the recent iOS iMessage vulnerability — being stuck in an OS that will never get security updates sounds like a really risky thing to do.
That's fair, I just wanted to steer the conversation away from a mobile OS flame war since the question was worded a little antagonistically IMO. It may not have been your intent, I just read it that way.
I think it's a valid question - if the OP is actually looking for a functional user experience and isn't stuck in iOS's proprietary walled garden they would likely find that jailbroken iOS is functionally equivalent to stock Android.
I suppose it is a valid question - it was just worded a little antagonistically (it may not have been their intent, but that's how it reads to me). Things like this seem to devolve into mobile OS flamewars, so I was trying to avoid that. It seems like OP wanted to discuss was tweaks people are using - convincing them to use Android wasn't really the purpose here.
I don’t Jailbreak and haven’t for about a decade at this point since most of the things I used to do it for were rolled into the OS, but I would guess most who do it do so because they enjoy the UI conventions, interactions, animations, etc on iOS more.
As someone with devices from both sides of the fence, the interactions, UX, etc on Android has always felt odd somehow and I could see that being irritating enough to make jailbreaking for the choice bits of Android without the rest of Android seem appealing.
This is a good question and its gonna be different for everyone, but I'll answer with my main 2 reasons.
Apple's UX is (imo) soooooo much better than androids. Things feel stiff and incoherent on the (admittedly few) androids I've used. I also prefer the UI more than androids. Switching would take a while to get used to in this regard and I don't think its worth the week of frustration.
"getting an android" is an expensive affair. I like having a "nice phone" so in order to make the switch to android I'd have to drop a lot of money. With a jailbreak I can make my relatively old phone look pretty fresh whenever I get bored of it.
For me, jailbreaking an iPhone isn't done with the intent of "making an iPhone more like an android", it's done with the intent of "giving me more control over my iPhone". I want all the bells and whistles (or lack thereof) of the apple product without the restrictions.
“Stiff” is a good descriptor of Android UX. In comparison iOS feels more… organic, I guess? It’s difficult to put into words.
"fluid" is the way I like to think about it. Everything cascades and speeds up before settling into place, the best example that is the control centre.