Video shows you how to jailbreak your iOS 6.1 device

This Cult of Mac video makes it look pretty easy to jailbreak your iPhone or iPad. What is a good reason to do it? If you have jailbroken your iOS device to do something cool that you couldn't have accomplished with a non-jailbroken device, please tell us about it in the comments.

• [davecotter]

  1: tethering.  2: double-press the sleep button to turn on the flash. 3: mail filters. 4: insanely customizable lockscreen info. 5: wireless AFP access (mount your phone in the finder as a volume). 6: video screenshots. 7: forward your voice mail to your email (as a sound file). 8: i like my home screen to rotate too.  9: 1 button to delete all email

  • [kwoww]

    what do you use to forward voicemail to email? i saw voicemail forwarder, but that looks like it’s only for older versions of ios…

    • [EggyToast]

      It’s a common feature in businesses, but it’s essentially for any situation where you’d receive a voicemail but be unable to retrieve it from the phone network. For business, it’s like having a VM on your office phone when you’re out of the office, and for personal, it’s for when you’re traveling w/o cell service but have internet access (wifi), or just lazy and don’t feel like answer your phone that you left downstairs while you’re upstairs on the computer.

      • [kwoww]

        sorry – i meant what app do you use to do it? i would find that VERY useful.

• [Chas]

  on Android there are a ton of great apps available that require root. Privacy control, memory/battery management and homescreen mods being the main advantages.  Are there similar apps available for the iP?  I don’t imagine they make them available at the app store.  Where  would you get them?

  • [SuperMatt]

    Google “cydia” and you’ll see.

• [coop]

  Those are all good, although tethering works in Canada, only thing that Rogers is better than ATT I suppose.

  The most significant one for me would be to use apps that apple used to allow, but suddenly banned.

  In particular, there used to be a number of ‘wifi sniffer’ apps in the store. They allowed you to see the signal strength, channel, SSID, etc. for all the networks that your phone could receive – not just the ones that Apple thinks are strong enough for you to use. These were great troubleshooting tools for network installations. Alas, these were banned in the store and then stopped working with iOS 4.3 (I think that was the rev).

  As I really don’t want to jailbreak my iPhone, I now carry an Android device to do this function.

  I’m sure others will have similar stories.

• [Glutnix]

  Love that Tettix/Cicada track so much. Remember first hearing it on the Millennium Falcon build http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/01/28/50-years-of-lego-ult.html

• [Eric Jacobsen]

  Flux, that awesome “tone down the blue light on your Mac at night to prevent insomnia” app, can be installed on jailbroken iOS devices

  • [David Phillips]

    This is the number one reason why I jailbreak my iPad. I hate to think of going back to a non-Flux world and still trying to use my iPad as a primary reading device.

• [Extrema]

  Remove animations (switches screens instantly)
  go directly to springboard with home button, skipping lockscreen
  change carrier name to Skynet

• [xzzy]

  Develop and install apps without needing a developer subscription and/or  certificate. Apple limits developers to 100 “test” certificates per year, which is pretty restrictive. 

  Jailbreaking lets developers install onto older hardware in-house without using up valuable tester slots.

• [jandrese]

  Automatic Lyric loading in the music player. 

  • [ohbejoyful]

    Ooo, name of app or plugin please?!

    • [jandrese]

      Lyricalizer by ac3xx

• [Francis Delaney]

  Integrate Google Voice into your Messages app so you can save money on texts.

  http://lifehacker.com/5875247/how-to-improve-your-google-voice-experience-on-the-iphone

• [Benjamin Schlotz]

  rapid switching of settings (network, 3g, wifi, bluetooth etc) with sbsettings.  super helpful for extending battery life.

  holding up/down volume buttons for next/previous track. (also sbsettings)

  scumm emulation to play those awesome old lucas arts adventure games.

  • [adonai]

    Hell yes…I judge my phones on whether they can play Day of the Tentacle or not :)

    • [Finnagain]

       If it were Grim Fandango, I’d be all in.

• [Rauz242]

  I haven’t jailbroken in years since I really haven’t been missing too many of the features but might be fun to try it again.

  This thread on Reddit has a lot of good tips.
  http://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/17lors/a_list_of_76_cydia_packages_i_have_on_my_iphone_4/

• [niktemadur]

  Where I live, cell signal comes and goes, and here I’m happy just to use Wi-Fi to listen to TuneInRadio on the iPhone.
  However, iPhone insists on telling me and making me physically acknowledge that yes, “signal is no longer available” every time the signal goes, dozens of times a day, every day.
  With the jailbreak and Popup Blocker, I finally got permanently rid of this extremely annoying “notification setting” that Apple does not allow you to deactivate.

  Living close to the US-Mexico border, I like to quickly and easily disable and re-enable network settings when I drive across the border, so a big favorite of mine is one of the most popular ones, SBSettings which I access from the lockscreen with the Activator app.  I just double tap the clock, SBSettings comes up, and with four more taps, down goes Location, 3G, Data Roam and Data, otherwise I’d have to navigate in and out of several menu labyrinths.

  Good stuff, all about customizable functionality.

• [Glaurung-Quena]

  I just have two must-have jailbreak apps: Adblock for mobile safari, and Ikeywi (5 row keyboard, saves my sanity when typing in passwords).  I also install a few tweaks (no lock screen for my ipad, change autocorrect to only correct what I tell it to, stuff like that), but Adblock and number keys on the same screen as the alphabet are what kept me from upgrading to IOS 6 until today.

• [wrybread]

  Lots of important reasons have already been mentioned, but the biggie for me is SBSettings: swipe the status bar (the bar at the top) and I get a bunch of buttons, one of which gives me instant access to brightness control. I read all the time off my iPhone, and having to go to Settings to control the brightness is really tedious, and this fixes that nicely. I really wish Apple would a shortcut to brightness in the taskbar like they did on the iPad, but alas.

  • [rynokins]

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWBn2RtnZd0

    I prefer NCSettings over SBSettings. It’s the one thing I missed the most when I upgraded my phone. Feels like it should come stock in iOS. 

• [Magill Foote]

  VLC’s media player app allows you to transfer whatever video files you want from your computer to your ipad. Really handy if you want to take movies or TV shows on the road but don’t want to buy them through iTunes, or won’t have access to an internet connection.

  • [Zack Rubenstein]

    This can be done on a non-jailbroken iPhone too. Good player is one app that I use.

  • [Finnagain]

     There are free video converters available.

• [Sitaram Das]

  at the risk of seeming spammy,

  I work with a company that offers unlimited talk/text/data for $50 a month.
  If you have an unlocked GSM iPhone, you can use the service with it.
  I’m pretty happy with it.
  http://solavei.com/sitaramdas

  • [Ben King]

    Too bad the service area is abysmally lacking.

  • [jgs]

    This story is about a jailbreak. It has nothing to do with unlocking the baseband. A jailbroken SOME_CARRIER phone will still be network-locked to SOME_CARRIER.

• [jimmoffet]

  I run a rooted android phone with a version of android developed by an open-source community (cyanogenmod). Because I am rooted (~jailbroken), I can use any number of flavors of android developed by thousands of different people.

  I can use the latest cutting-edge version of Android as soon as it is developed. No more waiting for device manufacturers to release a watered-down update months behind the android development community.

  The important bits:

  I now get three full days of normal use, whereas I got around 20 hours with the stock OS. Speed is also much, much better, the phone does not stall regardless of what I’m asking it to do (I don’t use animations).

  I can control which apps autostart on my phone (this is part of both the battery savings and the increase in speed) and I have frozen everything that I don’t use and that isn’t necessary. As a result, my phone only busies itself with what I ask it to do, not what the carrier or the device manufacturer thinks it should be doing.

  I would put my 3 year old phone up against the newest, fastest hardware and I have no doubt it would destroy any new stock model in battery life, responsiveness and general usability.

  Even before using a single app that requires root, I have a device that is superior in user-interface, responsiveness and battery life, all of the most important priorities for the average user.

  My phone outperforms its market-price by roughly a factor of four, because I was able to root it.

  Imagine if you bought a car outright from the dealer and they tried to tell you that it was illegal (not just that it voids your warranty, but it’s actually illegal) to change the stereo or the spark plugs, or to put on a seat cover, unless you bought them from the dealership, you’d never stand for it (and forget about driving it in another country, they’ll actually take you to jail for that!). Well, you shouldn’t stand for it with phones either.

• [Mitch_M]

  Just being able to put your foot down and say “It’s MY device, I paid for it, and I can do whatever I want with it, goddammit!” is cool in and of itself. But it’s sad that a plurality of people would accept devices that they can’t use however they want by default.

• [Andy III]

  There’s a simple little app that allows all kinds of rule based settings changes that I found really useful. 

  For instance, I have it set my phone’s brightness to go way down after 10pm. Then back up in the morning. It also has triggers for things like locations (by wifi) when plugged in to charge (which for my phone meant that maybe it was in the car, so bring up my podcast app to get ready for the commute. Not earth shattering, but really handy.

• [citykids]

  I’m still running IOS 5.1 on my jailbroken 1st gen iPad, now I find out after waiting all this time for IOS 6 to be broken – that Apple has it so that only iPad 2 and up can only get IOS 6!?!

  So what happens when the apps that I have need updating and say “requires IOS 6 and up”?  Gee, thanks a lot Apple!

  • [jgs]

    You just now noticed that Apple has shown a strong willingness to obsolete older machines? Sorry about that.

    Sometimes this behavior on their part pisses me off, but it’s my understanding (and impression from using my own) that the iPad 1 is pretty badly RAM-deprived compared to the more recent ones. So I’m not so sure this is anything other than a practical move on their part. This time.

    (The straight-up answer to your question, by the way, is “you can’t”.)

• [Jordan Pickett]

  i get lots of bang for my buck w/ my 1st gen ipad (still running ios 5.0), jailbroken to run btstack and a third party blue tooth gps with GISroam – i work as an archaeologist in the eastern mediterranean, and this type of software interface lets me do mobile GIS work in addition to super valuable/time-saving GPS work for navigation (finding unmarked monuments on Google Earth, dropping points, then driving to them on dusty roads through fields in the middle of nowhere!). folks have been using palmpilots with mobile GIS platforms for several years now (thank you Tom Tartaron and the Eastern Korinthia Survey project!), but i’d never have had this sort of flexibility without a jailbroken ipad – i’ve set several people up w/ the same system.. paying for international roaming charges on my ipad vs wifi at the basecamp or hotel – easy choice!!!

• [Nick Kukich]

  1.) Have actual control of your expensive device.

• [Jeffrey Martin]

  I want to remove icons from the home screen. Completely. including that “news stand” app that I can’t even put in a folder!

• [Jason Weisberger]

  I ran it, Mark. Injecting. Not Touching. Tapping. Remounting. A boy could have a pretty good time running this software…

• [Alessandro Magni]

  jailbroken Ipad > iMame4all + Icade (http://www.ionaudio.com/products/details/icade ) = heaven!