How to Use Cydia (Video)

The whole point of jailbreaking, if we’re honest, boils down to being able to get Cydia on your iPhone/iPad and the plethora of jailbreak tweaks contained within. The only thing is, that Cydia in itself can be a little intimidating and overwhelming to your first time jailbreakers. Opening it, you’re presented with a multitude of screens and very little indication of how to get started. Unlike the Apple App Store, what Cydia makes up for in the out of the box thinking functionality in its tweaks, it sort of lacks in the UI department. With that said, though, you can quickly learn a little bit about Cydia and be navigating it like a pro and installing awesome tweaks in no time.

So, you’ve jailbroken, the Cydia icon is staring you in the face, how do you use it?

I put together a quick video to show you how to use Cydia and also give you a quick rundown of it’s layout, what each section is for, and how to find jailbreak tweaks worth installing.

How to Use Cydia

Let’s talk about the various tabs in Cydia so you can use them appropriately (instead of staring at them blankly).

Featured

Here’s where you’ll find access to the creator of Cydia Jay Freeman (aka Saurik) and Cydia-related news, check out the featured tweaks in various categories (a great place to get started with what tweaks you might want to use to get your feet wet), followed by what seem to me to be ads for various jailbreak tweaks, some help articles and a place to manage your account.

Cydia uses Paypal or Amazon payments to accept payments for apps, but it uses Facebook or Google to authenticate you. It’s a good idea to go in here and connect one of those as you can then sign back in with this account whenever you need to to restore tweaks you’ve previously purchased.

Sources

Sources, also called repositories, are the places that Cydia checks for apps essentially. Think of the Apple App Store as having just one repo, the Apple one, that it checks for apps, while Cydia allows third parties to have their own apps hosting in their own repositories. When you first open this, you’ll already notice a few in here like Bigboss, ModMyi, etc. and for the most part most of the tweaks are going to come from these as they are the most popular. The only time you’ll ever really need this screen is if you stumble upon a jailbreak tweak featured on a website that is hosted in it’s own repo. In that case, you’ll be required to come here, click edit, then add and put in the provided repo’s url before that tweak will be able to be found in the Search section.

Changes

After that, we have Changes (not the Tupac song). Which, for the most part, is the section where you can see a running list of all of the changes made to various tweaks throughout the Cydia store sorted by date and alphabetical order. You know, in case you were curious…

Installed

Installed is up next, which, as you can guess, shows you all of the tweaks you’ve, well, installed. If you change the tab at the top from User to Expert, you’ll also see a list of the different packages that those tweaks have installed that they need to run (but aren’t necessarily tweaks in themselves). Moving it to Recent shows you all of the tweaks in chronological order instead of alphabetical in case you need to get rid of a tweak you recently installed as it’s not quite working like you expected.

When that does inevitably happen, simply follow these steps to uninstall the tweak and get back on track:

1. Open Cydia and tap on the Installed tab.

2. Tap Recent to see them listed in chronological order so it’s easier to find the culprit. Then tap on the tweak suspected of causing the issue.

3. Tap Modify in the top right corner.

4. Tap Remove at the bottom.

5. Tap Confirm.

6. Tap Reboot (or Restart Springboard) to finish the uninstallation process.

If for some reason you can’t get to Cydia (see: royally screwed), simply head to my video how to on fixing an unresponsive iPhone thanks to a bad jailbreak tweak.

Search

Finally we have the good stuff. Search. Here is where you can type in the name of whatever tweak you are looking for and then ultimately install it.

The only issue here is, what do you type? The Cydia store isn’t great at showcasing apps like the App Store is so the only real solution here is websites. Checking out some of the sites that showcase jailbreak tweaks can help you weed out what tweaks are worth your time. You can either Google around for some or you can check out my Jailbreak Tweak section on my site below where I’ve done videos on some of my favorites that I think you should check out.

Once you find one you want to try out, start typing it into the search field and tap it when it comes up.

After that, if the app is free it’ll say Install at the top right, if it costs money, it’ll say Purchase and if it isn’t supported by your version of iOS (which happens as new versions come out –developers aren’t able to update their app to support it) it’ll say recheck to check if the app is now supported.

If it says purchase, you’ll tap that and be brought to the login screen for your Facebook/Google account after signing in there, you’ll be presented with the billing screen where you can choose to pay with Paypal or Amazon (and there’s a third option to pay with Amazon and have it save your payment info to make the billing screen faster on future tweak purchases).

Once you’ve paid the Purchase will turn into an Install at that point you click that then Confirm to install the tweak. You can also click Continue queuing to be able to find other tweaks and once you have all the ones you want to install, tap Confirm to install all of them at once. This is helpful if you have a bunch you know you want to install as generally the device needs to be rebooted or resprung (the act of rebooting the home screen launcher only) after the tweak is install. Queuing them allows you only need to reboot once after installing all of them instead of after each one.

Next you’ll tap the reboot/respring button and when it reboots, you can either open the tweaks app if it has one, or go to Settings and scrolling down to see the various tweaks and their settings.

That’s pretty much it. Cydia in a nutshell. Hope this helps some new jailbreakers out and welcome to your new found freedom and feel free to reach out to me in the comments below with any feedback or questions.