The best of jailbreak: 10 apps worth hacking your iPhone for

Now that can legally jailbreak your iPhone, you might be asking yourself why bother? After all, ISO4, 3 and 2 have brought so many improvements, and Apple has approved so many apps it used to block from the app store. What can jailbreaking my iPhone offer me? Check out these 10 great jailbreak apps that could convince you to take a leap of faith and crack your iPhone.

If you’re unsure how to do it, follow our jailbreak guide here. Most of the apps listed will install using Cydia, the iPhone jailbreak app store equivalent. Once you have Cydia installed, you should have no problem finding the app. If you can’t find the app you want, try and add a custom repository (which is just a list of more apps). Google Cydia Repositories and you’ll see there are heaps of brand new apps for you to discover.

Remember that Cydia, just like the normal iPhone app store, is a store. Which means you’ll find both free and paid-for apps. Keep in mind that just because you’ve jailbroken your phone, not everything is free. Some of these jailbreak apps are extremely well built and supported, and you’ll have to pay for them. It’s not dodgy, they just weren’t allowed into the iPhone app store for some reason. Lastly, remember that you can jailbreak your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, so don’t feel left out if you’ve only got an iPod Touch and not an iPhone, you too can join in on the jailbreaking fun.

Winterboard Winterboard, at the end of the day, is essentially an iPhone themes app. However, this little app was created by the creator of Cydia, Jay Freeman aka saurik, so it is extremely versatile and impressive. Winterboard doesn’t just change your background or the colour of your icons, it can change just about everything, even giving you completely new layouts. There are already thousands of themes out there, and what’s more the themes are modular, so you can mix and match parts of different themes with each other. Recommended as your first jailbreak app.
SBSettings This is the granddaddy of quick settings apps. You can kill processes that are bogging down the system, or switch your 3G and wi-fi on and off with the flick of a finger. It saves you from going through all the usual settings pages. Just about every useful setting that you’d want to change on your iPhone can be found in a single page. The 3G and wifi on/off feature is probably the most useful, since flicking them off quickly when you’re not using them can literally save you hours of battery life, not to mention bandwidth.
Music Controls This little app adds system integration into many popular music applications and gives you a whole host of ways to control your music. These include via popup controls, lockscreen controls, headset controls, status bar controls and lockscreen swipe gestures. What’s more this little app is small, fast and adds great functionality that should have been on the iPhone from the beginning and it doesn’t use tons of system resources.
Safari Download Manager It really doesn’t get any simpler than this. Do you browse in Safari and wish you could download a file, or for that matter a couple of files at the same time? Once you install Safari Download Manager you can. Downloads are just a click away with this little app that will run in the background. To check your download progress and manage what you’ve already downloaded, you simply click the new download tab at the bottom of the Safari window where all your current and completed downloads are listed. Once again a great app and a feature that should have been built into the iPhone from the start.
Snappy This app is designed for one thing and one thing only — opening the camera as fast as possible and taking a photo. You can launch it from the app icon, but since the app comes bundles with Activator (an app launcher that uses gestures or key combinations to perform preset functions) you can launch Snappy while you’re in an another app, take a picture or video (video is only available on iPhone 3G and above) and be back in the app you were using in seconds. No more missing that once in a lifetime Kodak moment.
ProSwitcher This is just a front-end for a Cydia app called Backgrounder that, as its name suggests, allows you to run apps in the background. ProSwitcher allows you to manage what Backgrounder is doing and lets you switch between running apps, much like you do when switching between tabs in Safari. It’s very useful to have if you’ve gone through the effort of jailbreaking and you’re having trouble managing multiple apps running in the background.
Action Menu Plus Pack AMPP is a really nifty app that allows you much greater functionality when it comes to using copy and paste on your iPhone. You’ve got the usual copy and paste, but this little app also adds a clipboard and history of your copies. What’s more, it has a tweet button, so you can select something, click and tweet –no mess, no fuss. Once you’ve been using it for a while, the copy history function will probably become your most beloved feature in this smart menu app.
Veency Everyone, well every geek, knows that there are plenty of apps in the app store that allow you to use VNC to remote into your PC from your iPhone. But this jailbreak app has an ace up its sleeve. With Veency you can remote into your iPhone from your Mac or PC. Cool, but why? Well, you could answer the phone and make a call by just clicking on your desktop and using the speaker or bluetooth headset. You could also use it as a calendar widget, or, for that matter, imagine being able to use any iphone app right on your desktop. It’s as easy as Veency.
MultiIconMover This one is extremely straightforward and simple, and is once again a feature that the iPhone should have had. With MultiIconMover you can move multiple apps all at one time. Just select and drag, that’s it.
Installous Like Cydia, this is an app store, and to get it you’ll have to add a new repository at http://cydia.hackulo.us, before installation. This last app comes with a warning. In this app store you’ll find just about every app you can think of, but as cracked and free versions. This is bad and unreliable, so don’t download them. But it is useful to download apps that aren’t available in your region. Say for example that there is an free app in the US that isn’t available in the UK app store. Now you can click on Installous and download the app through it. A very useful app if you don’t break the law and download cracked content.