So the Pangu team put out an untethered jailbreak for iOS 9.0 through 9.0.2 on Tuesday, and by Thursday night I'd caved and run it on my iPhone 6. I'd been holding off since iOS 9 came out in September, mostly out of laziness, but three days of seeing screenshots of people's Auxo dock and NCSettings toggles on Twitter wore me down.
If you haven't done this before: you download the Pangu app (Windows or Mac, though the Mac version has always felt like an afterthought to me), plug your phone in, hit go, and wait while it does its thing. Mine took about eighteen minutes, and Cydia crashed twice during the initial respring, which is basically tradition at this point. Nothing about jailbreaking has ever been smooth on day one. It never is.
First thing I installed was Auxo 3, which is $3.99 now I think, maybe $2.99 during a sale, I honestly lose track. Then NCSettings for the toggles Apple still refuses to build in, and Overboard because stock iOS 9 multitasking still looks like a deck of oversized playing cards to me and I hate it. Springtomize for icon spacing. That's basically my whole setup, it hasn't changed much since iOS 7.
Here's my actual complaint, though, and it's not really about Pangu, who did fine work as always. It's that the jailbreak scene feels thinner than it did in 2012 or 2013. Back then half my Cydia sources were personal projects from developers you'd recognize by name, tweaks that did genuinely weird stuff to the OS. Now a lot of what used to require jailbreaking is just... in iOS already. Notification Center, Control Center, third-party keyboards, widgets in the today view. Apple absorbed the good ideas and left jailbreakers fighting over scraps like custom lock screen clocks. I still do it every year because I'm stubborn and I like tinkering, but I'd be lying if I said this felt as essential as it used to.
And there's a real cost to it. By Friday morning my battery had dropped something like 20% overnight just sitting on the nightstand, which never happens on stock iOS. Took me a while to figure out it was a background process from one of the tweaks (I think it was a repo I'd added for a lockscreen widget, not even one of the ones I listed above) just refusing to sleep. Uninstalled it, problem mostly went away. This is the tax you pay. Nobody talks about the tax enough when they're posting their home screen screenshots.
Small tangent, but it was a rough week for tech companies generally — Twitter announced Monday it's cutting about 8% of its staff, somewhere around 336 people, which is a lot for a company that size. I've had a Twitter account since before this blog existed and it's strange watching a service that felt so inevitable a few years back keep stumbling on the business side while the actual product mostly just works fine. Not really related to jailbreaking except that both stories this week are, in their own way, about a piece of tech from a few years ago aging in public.
Anyway. If you're on an iPhone running 9.0 through 9.0.2 and you want to jailbreak, now's your window, and it always closes eventually when Apple patches whatever exploit Pangu used. I'd back up first, obviously, and don't install every tweak you see on Reddit at once — do it one at a time so you can actually tell which one is murdering your battery or causing the springboard to crash. Learned that one the hard way more than once.
I don't know how long I'll keep doing this. Every year the reasons get a little thinner and the risk of bricking something I actually rely on gets a little less worth it. But not this year. This year I've still got Auxo back and my dock how I like it, and that's enough for now.