Back in “jail” (upgraded to iOS 7.1)

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broken Reminders appI ran into a problem last night where the Reminders app on my iPhone 4S stopped updating with the Reminders in iCloud. Figuring it was just a typical sync issue I turned off the Reminders syncing, planning on just turning it on again to fix the problem. When I turned them off, I let iOS delete the local reminders on my phone (since they were still up in iCloud).

But after turning the sync back on, my Reminders app was completely broken: the default list was missing and I couldn’t add one because the plus (+) button was grayed out! The “Default List” under the Reminders settings was also missing, and Siri couldn’t add new reminders either.

Perusing Google and the Apple support forums, it appeared that of course, a complete reset of the phone might fix the problem. I didn’t want to do that, though, because I would lose my iOS 7.0.6 jailbreak when the phone would update itself to iOS 7.1.

But as the evening wore on, I started noticing more and more strange problems on my phone: I couldn’t download any apps from the App Store (they gotSemi-Restore stuck in a “Waiting …” status) and my iCatcher podcast app wouldn’t download anything either. At some point, Siri lost her voice and wouldn’t talk anymore. The phone’s data connections (WiFi and 3G) seemed fine and almost everything else (like GMail, Chrome, etc.) seemed to be functional.

At this point I knew I had to do something, so I first tried a “Reset All Settings” but that didn’t fix any of the issues. Next, desperate to keep my jailbreak, I tried Semi-Restore which claimed to reset a jailbroken phone as close to factory as it could without losing the jailbreak. I was hopeful, but since the tool didn’t actually do anything to system files, all of the problems were still present once it finished. So now I was finally facing the fact that I would going to have to try the complete system restore and upgrade to iOS 7.1.

I let iTunes do it thing, and once I had a “clean” phone running iOS 7.1, all of the issues were resolved. Then, to save some time, I restored my iTunes backup. Unfortunately, all of the problems returned! Apparently whatever the root cause was, it was in the backup. Since Apple doesn’t support partial restores, there was no way I could come up with to restore the stuff I wanted but let everything else (Reminders, Siri, App Store, etc.) get overwritten with the defaults. I had to do another full restore and then starting setting up my iPhone 4S from scratch, one app and setting at a time.

I have mixed feelings about being back in Apple’s “jail.” On the one hand, I don’t have to worry about conflicting Cydia tweaks or jailbreak apps causing springboard crashes or general instability. Without having the ability for almost infinite tweakability, maybe I’ll waste less time tinkering. On the other hand, though, I already miss my setup and am finding it hard to adjust to the “normal” way of doing things in iOS 7.1. I miss being able to tweak my Control Center toggles, or customizing how the Notification Center looks. Most of all, I miss biteSMS (and I lost all my text messaging history in the restore, ugh).

Hopefully this isn’t the end of the jailbreak road for me, which I started down back in 2010 when I jailbroke iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS. I’m confident and optimistic that the jailbreak community will continue to find success against Apple’s walled garden in iOS 8 and beyond. Although, who knows … now that I have a Samsung tablet, my next phone might be running Android.

One Comment

  1. My phone seems slightly more stable (fewer springboard crashes) now that I’m back on stock iOS, but I see 7.1 still has the problem where trying to use the camera inside apps (like Scanner Pro or my banking app) causes the app to just crash. Sometimes trying again will work, but other times a reboot is necessary.

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