Yesrterday, Jay Freeman aka Saurik – the father of Cydia app store – surprised the jailbreak community by releasing Cydia 1.1.19 which no longer runs as “root”, but as “mobile.” While the terminology seems ambiguous, this means that Cydia Substrate tweaks can now influence Cydia itself. In other words, jailbreak tweaks can now modify Cydia, giving developers ability to customized the look and feel of Cydia and even add new functionality.
It didn’t take long before developers released Cydia tweaks designed for Cydia to improve its look or add new functionality. Thre are a few jailbreak tweaks already available for download to modify Cydia.
ShareTweak – Cydia Tweak
This jailbreak tweak for Cydia lets you share any package details with others using built-in share sheet of iOS. ShareTweak adds a share button at the top-right corner of the Cydia, and brings together install and remove options in Cydia into a new interface.
Codling – Cydia Tweak
Codling is developed by HASHBANG Productions and it blurs the loading HUD that appears when refreshing Cydia. This new Cydia tweak features both a light and dark themes for the loading heads-up display that can easily be configured via preference panel by going into stock Settings app of iOS.
Pheromone – Cydia Tweak
Pheromone is another jailbreak tweak developed by by HASHBANG Productions, designed specifically for Cydia to improve the overall user experience and ass new features. This tweak adds brown tint to the buttons/tabs within Cydia to match them with Cydia’s icon. So all the buttons in Cydia, including navigation bar and Tab bar becomes brown after installing this tweak.
To install Pheromone, to need to add repo to Cydia: http://cydia.hbang.ws/.
While these tweaks seems very simple in nature, but are excellent proof of concepts. It’s just the start of some cool stuff that we should start seeing from jailbreak developers. Just imaging a fully themed Cydia store with customizable features. This is perhaps one of the most exciting developments for the jailbreak community in quite some time where sky really is the limit to what could be done with Cydia.