Settings.bundle & keychain for applications from Cydia doesn't work

Question

I'm working on app which is distributed with Cydia. So it is installed in /Applications folder, not /var/mobile/Applications/ as usual AppStore apps. And I assume that installation give me some huge problems. At first, keychain read & write with famous Apple's KeychainItemWrapper doesn't work at all. Also, my settings.bundle doesn't work too. App settings don't displayed in Settings.app.

When I test application in Simulator or even deploy it from Xcode to device directly (it is deployed to /var/mobile/Applications/) everything works like a charm.

I tried moving installed .app to var/mobile/Applications/XXXXXX/myapp.app with making mobile:mobile as it's owner. It didn't help.

Any solution for making this work?

Answer 1

Settings Bundle

Settings work a little differently for jailbreak apps. You need to do something similar to the normal Settings.bundle, but there are differences.

See here for some information on that .

And here

And here

You should make your app depend on the preferenceloader package, which helps jailbreak apps manage Settings. So, you'll have something like this in your DEBIAN/control file:

package: com.mycompany.MyApp
Name: MyApp
Version: 2.2-2
Architecture: iphoneos-arm
Depends: preferenceloader
Description: Do something for jailbreak iPhones
...

Keychain

In order to make the keychain work for my app, I needed to add entitlements to my binary. The way I found out which entitlements were needed was to first build the app in the normal way (not a jailbreak app, just a normal 3rd-party app store app using Xcode). Then, I inspected the entitlements in the binary built by Xcode:

ldid -e MyApp.app/MyApp

And then spliced those entitlements into a new entitlements.xml file. See here for an example of applying entitlements . I believe the entitlements for your app should look something like this:

  <key>application-identifier</key>
  <string>L44W4W8ABC.com.mycompany.MyApp</string>
  <key>aps-environment</key>
  <string>development</string>
  <key>com.apple.developer.team-identifier</key>
  <string>L44W4W8ABC</string>

It's possible that this method of adding entitlements isn't necessary. See comments below your question for other options. However, I was adding other entitlements for other reasons, and could not do that through Xcode.