Dev:Updating extensions for iOS 7

This is an informal collection of advice; feel free to add to it and rearrange. A lot of this is from #theos on irc.saurik.com - if you're working on updating your tweaks and you use Theos, join in and share what you've learned (see IRC).

How to compile for ARM64
Tweak binaries must contain an ARM64 slice in order for it to be loaded into 64-bit processes. If you don't need to support iOS 4.2.1 or older, ensure Xcode 5 is installed and set  in your Makefile:

You will also need updated versions of any libraries that you link against which contain an arm64 slice. To get the updated Substrate dylib, see saurik's instructions below, starting from the  of the Substrate deb.

Apple hasn't yet released the source code of the Xcode 5 toolchain, so it is not yet possible to support ARM64 if you don't use OS X and Xcode's toolchain.

How to compile for ARMv6 and ARM64
These instructions only use first-party components from Apple, DHowett, and saurik (and were written by saurik).

The idea is that we are going to use parts of Xcode 4 (which you don't have to install: you might just have it sitting in /Volumes) to "fix" parts of Xcode 5 so that it can target armv6 (need Xcode 4.4.1).

Then, we download Theos directly from DHowett's code repository, and add in the parts it needs from the various packages provided by saurik.

Finally, in our Theos Makefile, we specify that we want to target iOS 2.0 using the 7.0 SDK, and that we want both ARMv6 and ARM64 slices.

Alternative method
This is slightly more complicated. You need to compile an armv6 slice using the 5.1 SDK and another arm64 slice using the 7.0 SDK. You then stitch both together with lipo. This blog post describes how to do that manually, but rpetrich has created a theos fork, which does that automatically for you.

Setup rpetrich’s theos:

(note from rpetrich: theos should be as a submodule for my fork, not installed in a system path. system paths are dangerous)

Install headers:

Setup the Makefile

rpetrich's theos is using objc's hooking method instead of MobileSubstrate therefore it doesn't link with MS by default. This is OK if you are only hooking objc messages, but if you need to use MSHookFunction, you have to tell theos to link to lib substrate:

(note from saurik: I highly disrecommend not using Substrate's MSHookMessage implementation; I never understood why rpetrich doesn't use it, but on multiple occasions the way we hook messages has had to change, and centralizing it in Substrate means that I can fix it once for everyone's compiled extensions... this happened last as recently as iOS 5, and all of rpetrich's extensions had to be recompiled and redeployed, which is reasonably fine for him as he's insanely productive and around constantly, but for most people you should please just use the centralized implementation.)

Example Projects: Take a look at the Makefiles of these projects:


 * https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15373/Other/iPhone/ilogit-tweak-ios7-example.tar
 * https://github.com/joedj/ExchangePolicyCleaner/blob/master/Makefile#L3
 * https://github.com/a3tweaks/Flipswitch

Updating code for ARM64
Read Apple's documentation on ARM64: "Converting Your App to a 64-Bit Binary"

If you need to specifically test for 64-bit:

Detecting iOS 7
Detecting whether code is being compiled for iOS 7.0 or higher:

Note that this is a compile time check. To check for iOS 7 at runtime, compare against the CoreFoundation version:

Apple often forgets to add new version number constants to their headers, so you may need to define the version numbers yourself:

See CoreFoundation.framework for a full list.

Updating Cydia Depictions
It's best to make the background transparent to make it match Cydia's background. Just add the following to your depiction's header:

And in your CSS:

Cydia's table cell styling hasn't currently been changed to reflect the iOS 7 UI, so no other CSS needs updating.

Theos bootstrap.sh patch for ARM64
01:03:36 [theos] rpetrich pushed 1 new commit to master: http://git.io/ankV8g 01:03:36 theos/master f6ebd79 Ryan Petrich: Workaround bootstrap problems on Xcode 5.x (temporary fix for now)

Dealing with 32-bit and 64-bit
12:38:15 <%joedj> sbingner: i did find this question (and the response 2 posts down) interesting, i'm not sure what they're talking about: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html#comment-7436311d02c5a55738d1baefa03b0d34 09:55:43 <@rpetrich> joedj: it's a bug with the components that communicate with the App Store

Theos and ldid errors
19:02:14 I've been off the jailbreak train for awhile now. Trying to reinstall theos, getting some build failures when trying to install ldid, anybody know if there's a quick fix? 19:02:52 like, error: unknown type name '__darwin_intptr_t' 19:02:59 and, error: unknown type name '__uint32_t'; did you mean 'uint32_t'? 19:05:27 < Alcatraz> are you trying to compile ldid on mac? 19:05:55 following step 4 of http://iphonedevwiki.net/index.php/Theos/Getting_Started 19:06:10 < Alcatraz> yeah compiling it has been broken for some time 19:06:27 < Alcatraz> has to do with xcode 5 19:06:32 < Alcatraz> pretty sure anyway 19:06:50 ldid is a dependency of theos though right? 19:07:01 < Alcatraz> yeah. you can ask someone on here for a copy 19:08:05 yoshbu, wget http://ac3xx.com/ldid -O $THEOS/bin/ldid && chmod +x $THEOS/bin/ldid

Accessing the device's UDID
UDID access is blocked by default on iOS7 and iOS will substitute a generated ID in UIDevice's uniqueIdentifier property. Use MGCopyAnswer(CFSTR("UniqueDeviceID")) and link against libMobileGestalt.dylib to get access to the device ID from system processes or apps installed to /Applications. Device ID is completely inaccessible from app store processes and some daemons.

For App Store apps, it appears you can still retrieve the UDID from MobileGestalt with a private entitlement:

Ongoing issues

 * CPDistributedMessagingCenter doesn't work.
 * Printing a stack trace doesn't show symbols.
 * Wee apps' (Notification Center widgets) principal class must now be a view controller subclass instead of implementing a protocol.