Welcome to the iPhoneDevWiki

Our goal is to share the sum of all human[1] knowledge about jailbroken iOS development. In other words, this is a collection of documentation written by developers to help each other write extensions (tweaks) for jailbroken iOS, and you're invited to learn from it and contribute to it too.

What is this wiki for?

Current featured article: Updating extensions for iOS 13

New articles: Kik, Active Developers, Inter Process Communication (IPC), Using ARC in tweaks, Career advice, IOMobileFramebuffer, IOAudio2Device, IOAudio2Transformer, RocketBootstrap, Breadcrumbs.

If you'd like to make a new article or improve an existing article, see Help:Editing for advice (and see #Editing this wiki for ideas). Articles that need work: Packaging (tools, control file tips, troubleshooting dpkg-deb errors), Next Steps After Getting Started (a set of ideas for tutorials you could write), edit this page and add your idea here.

Documentation over classes, especially regarding version-specific changes, hasn't been updated recently. If you see an article for a class you use and notice inaccuracies, something as simple as adding a "This information is outdated" or making a correction/note on code is incredibly helpful.

Getting started

New to developing for jailbroken devices? Welcome, it's fun and challenging! Hopefully you already have some experience with Objective-C. You will want to get familiar with Cydia Substrate (formerly called MobileSubstrate) and Theos, and you can study some Open Source Projects to see how existing tweaks work. See Getting Started and also take a look at Best Practices and MobileSubstrate Pitfalls. If you're looking for a more thorough and sequential tutorial, take a look at the book iOS App Reverse Engineering and its forum iOSRE.

How to ask for help: You can ask questions in the IRC channel #iphonedev on irc.saurik.com (where a bunch of developers hang out). IRC is an old-school chat system; if you don't already know how to use it, How to use IRC has details for you. There are also tags for "jailbreak", "Cydia", and "Theos" on Stack Overflow, a site for programming questions in general; feel free to ask there as well. On reddit, there's /r/jailbreakdevelopers. For non-development-related troubleshooting questions, try /r/jailbreak.

Overview of contents

By topic:

By iOS version:

Translated articles:





Editing this wiki

If you have anything at all to contribute, feel free to do so!

An account is required to edit pages, but everyone is welcome to make an account. If you have trouble with the account creation process, or any questions about editing the wiki, please ask in #iphonedev on irc.saurik.com for help (see How to use IRC).

Some ideas for information to contribute:

Add more projects to the list of Open Source Projects, or fill out details on that page.

Expand Getting Started for new developers - what do they need to know before beginning? How do they set up a development environment on OS X, Windows, and Linux? What are common beginner's mistakes that they should watch out for? How to reverse-engineer parts of iOS for writing tweaks? How to debug with GDB and learn about memory management?

Update articles that haven't been significantly edited in a few years, such as Seatbelt and Crack prevention. See Special:AncientPages for a list of articles that haven't been updated recently.

Help Cycript explain why Cycript is fun - syntax highlighting, injection, auto-completion, generally exploring around.

Make a page that documents a class or framework you're familiar with.

If you've developed a library that other developers can use or write addons/plugins/extensions for, make a page that documents your project.

Update Xcode with better information about how to build apps for jailbroken devices.

Make the homepage more useful! For example, add links to good pages that are hidden/buried deep within the wiki.

The following articles are linked from nowhere in the wiki: Special:LonelyPages - you can fix that by linking them somewhere.

Check out the most popular pages and see if they need updating: Special:PopularPages.

Write an article that is in demand: Special:WantedPages.

Translate an existing article into a non-English language. Check out the list at Special:PopularPages for ideas about high-priority articles to translate, and then make a new page with this name format: Article name/[language code] . Here's the list of language codes. For example: PreferenceLoader/de or Libactivator/sv.