Backgrounding apps on an iPhone

[pm]

There's an app that's been available for jailbroken iPhones on the Cydia installer called "Background" which is really useful. For most applications on the iPhone, changing from one app to another will kill the first app, and putting the iPhone in stand-by, kills that app as well. This fine for a lot of things that require input, but it's annoying for a lot of other apps that it would be useful to run in the background.

One great example is Pandora. You are listening to Pandora and you want to check your email. With a standard iPhone, leaving the Pandora app will kill the music stream. So you'd exit Pandora to check email and the music will stop right away.

Another example is Instant Messaging - like AIM. You really want to get instant messages no matter what you are doing on your iPhone - not just when you are sitting with the instant messaging app open and running on your iPhone.

And then there's my favorite app for Backgrounding which is DeviceScape's EasyWiFi which will auto-negotiate WiFi proxies. So if you are at a company or a university campus that has a web-based proxy for logging into the WiFi network, Devicescape's app will automatically fill in that proxy without you having to enter anything. Which is really neat - except that Devicescape only runs when you have click on the app and bring it up. What you really want is DeviceScape running in the background all the time and when it sees a WiFi network, it just automatically logs you into it without you doing anything.

So the answer to these problems is to Background these apps. You download it from Cydia and then you pull up the app you want to background and then hold down the home key for ~3 seconds and it will automatically run that app in the background. To remove it from backgrounding you just do the same thing again. If you can't remember which apps you've backgrounded, power-cycling the phone removes them all from the background.

So you shove Pandora in the background and you can listen to it with the phone in stand-by (click the power-off button and shove it in your pocket), or while surfing Safari, or while playing a game. Or you can just have DeviceScape always running and then you never have to deal with WiFi web proxies again - no entering your company's WiFi login credentials any more. Or get instant messages all the time no matter what you do.

So - the bad parts of backgrounding applications. Well, the first is that you have to jailbreak your iPhone. This seems like it's a big deal for a lot of people, but really it's easy to do and completely reversible (just install the latest firmware from Apple to undo it). The other bad part of backgrounding apps is power - this should burn a lot more power - and this is probably why Apple doesn't allow it. I have to say that I have Devicescape backgrounded all the time and I didn't notice my power getting worse at all when I started doing this. But I'm sure if you shoved Pandora running all the time in the background, you'd see a substantial decrease in battery life.

For me, backgrounding made things a lot easier my iPhone - particularly Devicescape allowing me to bypass proxies.

A tutorial on how to jailbreak your iPhone:
Windows 2G iPhone: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1880
Windows 3G iPhone: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1881
Mac 2G iPhone: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1557
Mac 3G iPhone: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1558

A tutorial on how to background applications:
http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=2010

 

[S Freud]

Very nice tutorial PM.:thumbsup: No wonder they made you a mod.

After all of the things you mentioned I would love to jailbreak my Iphone. I have a couple questions though.

Can they tell if I jailbreak it. I am with cingular and I'm afraid it will void my warranty. I would think they would be able to tell if I did this.

If I jailbreak it I can take it to another company right? Is there compatibility issues with things like internet or messaging? I would like to have a cheaper plan since Cingular charges you to have the Iphone plan.

Thanks

 

[pm]

So, the iPhone hacking community has their own terminology:

• Jailbreak - this essentially "opens" up the phone for reading and writing the filesystem.
  Unlock - allows you to use the phone with any carrier

You can have an unlocked phone that isn't jailbroken - although is a bit hard to do. And you can definitely have a jailbroken phone which isn't unlocked. There's no known way to do a software unlock of a 3G iPhone, but there's software to jailbreak them (so this backgrounding thing works on 3G phones). On the jailbreaking/unlocking software it's just a checkbox of choosing what you want to do.

Neither of these are "approved" by Apple or AT&T. That said, neither does anything that can't be reversed by software - doing a "restore" of the firmware back to the default firmware from Apple will undo a jailbreak, and if you choose right version (2.0 for example), it will undo the unlock as well.

A lot of people at work here at Intel have iPhones and a lot of them have jailbroken them, and, as long as they restored back to the default firmware, they've had warranty work done and Apple has never said anything about it. There seems to be a perception that unlocking is "worse" than jailbreaking - which has some truth. There's two processors on an iPhone - one which drives the OS and touchscreen, and other (called the baseband processor) which controls the radio communication. Jailbreaking touches the main processors, unlocking touches the baseband processor. It's easy to undo a jailbreak, but undoing a lock requires certain specific versions of firmware. Unlocks aren't that big a deal - I mean it's just changing an 8-bits registe in the baseband firmware. You just need to know which firmware will remove it.

If you unlock the phone, you can take it to other carriers - or use it with a prepaid plan. I have a $55/month family plan on T-Mobile for my 1st gen 16GB iPhone which gives me unlimited data, and 700 day (and unlimited night & weekend) minutes shared between my wife and I on two cell phones. It's discounted by a bit by my employer, but still in general you can save $10-20/month on T-Mobile versus AT&T.

 

[aphex]

Have you noticed any greater instability with it Jailbroken? I jailbroke my 1st gen iPhone and while it worked great, it was noticably less stable than stock. Haven't JB my 3G iPhone yet, but i've had to itch to start messing with summerboard/winterboard again.

 

[pm]

Since I'm running my iPhone unlocked on T-Mobile, I've been running jailbroken since August of last year. I have noticed at various points that the 3rd party apps on the installer did not very good things to my iPhone. In particular, Summerboard (which is the 3rd party replacement for the "Springboard" UI on the front iPhone screen) at various times since last August has caused the phone to crash and get flaky. Also adding in the Unix prompt - as cool as it is to set up cron jobs and "vi" plist files on a cell phone - seemed to mess things up too.

But since the 2.0 firmware release back in June, I scaled back the number of 3rd party apps and have been using the apps from the AppStore instead and things have generally been very stable ever since. Nowadays I just have three 3rd party apps installed - PDANet (which allows you to "tether" the iPhone), Background, and BossTool (adds in a lot of "admin" features, like disabling EDGE). Aside from Safari crashing back to the springboard on really, really big pages with lots of pictures (for whatever reason, I can never bring up http://icanhascheezburger.com/ ), my iPhone is completely stable and I have no complaints at all about stability. My stability seems as good as other iPhone owners.

 

[Muadib]

I was just discussing doing this today at work. Your guide makes it look easy. Might as well do it now.

 

[Muadib]

Jailbreaking was quite easy with this guide. The hardest part was waiting for the 2.10 file to download. It took forever.

Now that it's Jailbroken, how do you backup?

 

[S Freud]

A question about jailbreaking.

Will I lose anything if I reformat the firmware back? I have music and apps on there now. Will I lose anything if I jailbreak it? What if I need to set the firmware back, will I lose anything then?

On a semi related note. I can't seem to import my music into Itunes. I bought most of my music on my Iphone, when I try to "import purchased music into Itunes" it doesn't work. Any ideas?

 

[ViRGE]

If you do a restore, the entire phone is wiped. Presumably you have all of the media and AppStore apps you've loaded on the phone, so the only thing you'd really lose are the jailbroken apps.

 

[Muadib]

Originally posted by: ViRGE
If you do a restore, the entire phone is wiped. Presumably you have all of the media and AppStore apps you've loaded on the phone, so the only thing you'd really lose are the jailbroken apps.

So there is no way to backup the jailbroken apps?

 

[ViRGE]

I think there's an app on Cydia (the main iPhoneOS package manager for jailbroken devices) that does complete backups.

 

[Muadib]

Cool! I'll look for it.

 

[pm]

Here's a really thorough guide to backing up Apple's apps and Cydia's apps:
http://www.simonblog.com/2008/...before-iphone-upgrade/

iTunes does a great job of backing up iTunes music and settings and you can just re-sync your applications.
To be honest, I never much worry about backing up Cydia applications - I don't have many installed and they are easy enough to reinstall.

Glad it worked well for you, Maudib. Did you get the backgrounding app working?

The other Cydia apps that I use are
PDANet: http://iphonefreakz.com/2008/0...ptoppc-to-your-iphone/
PDANet allows you to use a laptop on WiFi to connect to the internet over your iPhone. EDGE is slow, but it's very handy occassionally to have even a very slow internet connetion for my laptop.

BossPrefs: http://sleepers.net/category/apps/bossprefs/
This gives lower level control for some applications and features. I use it to turn on and off OpenSSH.

OpenSSH: http://www.appleiphoneschool.com/openssh/
This allows you to SSH (secure shell) into an iPhone and move files onto and off of the phone over WiFi.

Ones that I haven't tried but are useful are:
cycorder allows video recording from the iPhone camera. Snapture is allows control of low-level camera settings. And SwirlyMMS which is a full-blown MMS app for the iPhone (http://www.swirlyspace.com/iphone/apps/mms/ )

 

[Muadib]

Yes, I got the background app working. I've been playing with it while I was out today, by leaving aim running in the background, and doing what I normally do while waiting for my gf to finish shopping.

I now know why Apple didn't allow this right from the start. It really kills the battery. I'm going to run Pandora & Aim together while I'm at work tommorrow, and see how many hours my iPhone survives.

PDANet is next on my list. I can't believe it was free.

I've also downloaded Snapture. I've been very disappointed in the iPhone's camera. Hopefully this will help.

 

[Buttzilla]

great guide!

 

[ummarshaikh]

How do I install apps for my Iphone without a credit card. Know the none option while registering for Itunes Store soes not work any guide for install apps on iphone

 

[Reckoner]

Originally posted by: ummarshaikh
How do I install apps for my Iphone without a credit card. Know the none option while registering for Itunes Store soes not work any guide for install apps on iphone

You can link a paypal account to your itunes account

 

[pm]

Originally posted by: Buttzilla
great guide!

Thank you.




I found a new 3rd party (jailbreak) app that I really like a lot: SBSettings. It's on Cydia under utilities, or just search for it.

What it does is allow very fast control of WiFi, Bluetooth, OpenSSH, or anything else that you want. It's a replacement for BossPrefs - if anyone used that before.

When you install there's no icon. You press two figures on the status bar at the top, or slide your finger left to right on the status bar (the bar at the top with your carrier and the time and the battery life, etc). This brings up 4 customizable buttons which are on/off switches for whatever you want. For me it's Bluetooth, EDGE, Airplane Mode and WiFi. Also it tells you your iPhone's IP addresses for EDGE and WiFi, and how much space you have left, and there's a power on/off button.

Why is this cool? Well, normally to turn off WiFi, I have to press settings, and then wait the 6 seconds that it takes for settings to come up usually, and then hit Wi-Fi and then hit on/off. Now I just slide, and click. MUCH faster. Turning on and off Bluetooth is similar it takes 3 menus normally - including the slow Settings menu - and now it's slide and click.

If you find yourself turning on and off WiFi and Bluetooth a lot - to save power - this thing is really, really nice. I find that if I keep Bluetooth and WiFi off most of the time, that I have no problem going 3-4 days between charges with my 16GB 1st Gen iPhone.

 

[Muadib]

Has SBSettings improved with 2.2? I found it to be very buggy, so much so that I didn't put it back on my phone.

 

[pm]

Buggy in what way? I haven't seen anything odd with it...

 

[Muadib]

My main reason for it was to turn off Bluetooth. It would always turn it off, but it almost never turned it back on. The only way I could get bluetooth back, was to turn off the phone.

I never tried it with WiFi, because I leave it off most of the time.

 

[pm]

Ah. I don't do much with Bluetooth - I use it when I'm travelling, but otherwise, I just use the wired headset or hold the phone. So I haven't touched Bluetooth at all.

I use the WiFi all the time and that seems to work. And then I use the ability to add/remove Apple icons - I replaced Stocks with Bloomberg and Weather with The Weather Channel. Since 2.1, I've had a problem with losing my EDGE IP address when I use WiFi, so I have been using EDGE on/off to renegotiate and it seems to work fine too. And that's about it - WiFi, icons and EDGE. Haven't touched Bluetooth yet, so I don't know if it's still buggy.