Appcast Video – Using Jailbreakme.com to Jailbreak iOS 4

iOS4 Review from a non-Jailbreak User

As mentioned in last week’s podcast, one of our listeners- Luke- sent in a nice little review of iOS4 from the standpoint of someone without a jailbroken device. He’s given his approval for us to post it here for the rest of you to read (since it was a bit long to read in the episode itself), so here it is: Read more »

Jailbreaking the 3GS to iOS 4: Avoid AptBackup!

So, over the last few days I went through the process of preparing for and jailbreaking my 3GS to iOS 4. Unfortunately, there isn’t as simple of a method as there was with the ones last time like Blackra1n or Spirit, so it required a return to the old ‘create a custom upgrade package and restore from it’ method using the Dev Team’s PwnageTool. A bit annoying since this requires a good bit more time AND risk in what can go wrong, but on the whole not entirely too bad.

The actual upgrade/jailbreak process went fairly easily, though the guide I was following wrongly stated to put the phone into DFU mode instead of the Recovery mode that you actually should be using. I was able to restore from the custom .ipsw without real incident, and soon had a 3GS running iOS 4 with Cydia on the springboard. But- that’s where things went very wrong.

Since I had a whole lot of Jailbreak stuff on the device, I decided to use AptBackup to archive everything and then re-load it onto the device once the upgrade was done. Now, the last time I did this- when giong from 2.X to 3.0- this caused me a whole lot of grief, and resulted in my having to basically completely restore the phone. Twice. But, I figured this was a fluke so gave it a shot again- and ended up in largely the same boat.

After loading all the packages onto the phone, immediately upon booting up the phone would go into MobileSubstrate ‘Safe Mode’- meaning one of the extensions/apps had crashed badly. So, I started uninstalling Cydia apps to try and find the offending one. Eventually, I got down to it and just uninstalled MobileSubstrate and all the apps that relied upon it. At which point, when the phone rebooted, it was working just fine- but I had nothing on my Springboard except for the Cydia apps and the stock ones that the phone comes with. ALL of my App Store-downloaded apps were not showing up. iTunes was still showing them as being there- but in the listing of the things on the phone, they were lumped into ‘other’ so I had like 20GB of ‘other’.

After doing everything else I could think of to no avail, I eventually simply restored the phone from the custom .ipsw again and let it re-install from the backup made right before the jailbreak process, after which it has been running just fine.

Now- to be fair, this likely is not AptBackup’s fault itself. The problem most likely is that one of the packages/dependencies installed messed things up- and that it installs a whole mess of things at once likely makes it all the worse. So, if you’re going to upgrade to Jailbroken iOS 4, I heavily recommend avoiding AptBackup and simply write down all of the Cydia apps/utilities that you make use of and then installing them individually to ensure that there aren’t any problems- some of them likely aren’t updated to be compatible with iOS 4, and by loading them up individually through Cydia you’ll likely be alerted to this.

The Appcast #71: June 20th, 2010 – iOS4 vs. Jailbreaking