 | |
| Developer(s) | Jay Freeman (saurik) |
|---|---|
| Initial release | 11 August 2008[1] |
| Final release(s) | |
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| Written in | |
| Operating system | |
| Successor | |
| Type | Code injection platform |
| License | Freeware |
| Website | www |
Cydia Substrate (formerly Mobile Substrate, commonly shortened to Substrate) was a platform that made it easier to develop third-party addons for iOS.
Cydia Substrate's initial code grew out of the core hooking functionality of the WinterBoard project. After the value of this code as its own library became clear, it was split into a separate package named Mobile Substrate for others to use. As a demonstration of this new library's versatility, Five Icon Dock was released. Dynamic library code injected by Cydia Substrate is referred to as an "extension", or more commonly, a "tweak".
Initial versions of Cydia Substrate were simply a loader for other dynamic libraries, using a manual patch of SpringBoard's LaunchDaemon plist for injection. Later versions inject into launchd, configuring the environment of all spawned processes to inject the Cydia Substrate loader. A key feature, Safe Mode (internally MobileSafety), was introduced to provide a user-friendly fallback when SpringBoard crashes.
Cydia Substrate provides a set of APIs that can be used to hook Objective-C methods, in addition to function symbols, at runtime. This follows its principle that all modifications should be done using runtime techniques, ensuring safety fallbacks that can prevent the device from entering a crash loop or other situation that is difficult to recover from. It later received support for hooking arbitrary memory addresses that may be protected by code signing.
The source code of Cydia Substrate was initially released under the BSD 3-Clause 'New' or 'Revised' License. The project grappled with what was seen as unfair competition from projects based on Cydia Substrate, particularly Rock Extensions and Mobile Enhancer. On 17 August 2010, with version 0.9.3366, the license was adjusted to the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 or later. As this still did not deter these projects, after the release of 0.9.3995, source code ceased to be released publicly. The final public commit is dated 11 January 2012.[4]
Following the discontinuation of the Telesphoreo repository in the iOS 11 jailbreak cycle, Cydia Substrate eventually was released for iOS 11 on Elucubratus.
There are two "final" releases of Cydia Substrate. The latest version on Telesphoreo is 0.9.6301, released on 12 September 2016, supporting iOS 2.0 through 10.3.4.[1] The latest version on Elucubratus is 0.9.7113, released on 28 April 2021, supporting iOS 11.0 through 14.8.1 (with the exception of A12 and later due to pointer authentication).[2]
Troubleshooting
As always, extra code means higher potential for crashing, and Cydia Substrate can solve this. Should SpringBoard crash for any reason (which is quite common once let loose on Cydia as there are a large number of SpringBoard extensions), Cydia Substrate will temporarily put the SpringBoard into Safe Mode with extensions disabled, so you can troubleshoot the problem.
If one is trying to troubleshoot a problem that isn't causing SpringBoard crashes but is suspected of being caused by an extension using Cydia Substrate, Safe Mode can manually be entered using the SBSettings application available in Cydia by hitting its "Power" button and choosing the "Safe Mode" option.
If you find that your device won't boot, you can force Cydia Substrate to not run by holding down the volume up key while the Apple boot logo is visible. This requires version 0.9.3997 or newer. Devices without a capable version can be forced into Safe Mode from a ramdisk or ssh by typing:
touch /var/mobile/Library/Preferences/com.saurik.mobilesubstrate.dat
Android
On 15 May 2013, Cydia Substrate for Android was released on the Google Play Store, alongside WinterBoard.[5][6] It is able to inject into apps and hook native libraries and Java methods in the Dalvik Java virtual machine, on ARMv6, ARMv7, and x86 devices running Android 2.3 through 4.3.1. The device must be rooted for injection to be possible.
Aside from WinterBoard, it does not appear that any apps were released on the Google Play Store that made use of Cydia Substrate. On 4 November 2014, Android 5.0 was released, replacing Dalvik with Android Runtime (ART). Cydia Substrate was not updated to support ART. Cydia Substrate and WinterBoard were delisted from the Google Play Store in 2017 or 2018.[3]
See Also
References
- ^ a b c http://apt.saurik.com/debs/
- ^ a b https://apt.elucubratus.com/debs/1443.00/
- ^ a b https://web.archive.org/web/20170110195857/https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.saurik.substrate
- ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20130107031948/http://gitweb.saurik.com/substrate.git/shortlog
- ^ https://twitter.com/saurik/status/334357924287750144
- ^ https://twitter.com/saurik/status/334357963647098880