iPhone World

First of all, Cydia is awesome, no question about that. But if you have anything but a 3GS, it can be painfully slow to load and that can be a deterrent for keeping things updated. Let’s have a look at a much faster way. Enter Apt.

You will need SSH enabled on your iPhone/iTouch to begin with. If you do not, you must install OpenSSH from Cydia and probably the SSH Toggle for SBSettings. Also you’ll need to install Apt from Cydia. Look for ‘Apt 0.7 Strict’.

Now go ahead and SSH into your device. Be aware that you cannot use the apt tools while Cydia is running. The commands you will use the most frequently are as follows:

• apt-get update
  • Updates the repositories. Equivalent to refreshing in Cydia.
• apt-get upgrade
  • Installs any updates available.
• apt-cache search <search string>
  • Search the repositories
• apt-get install <packagename>
  • Install a package. If there are dependencies, you will be prompted to continue.
• apt-get remove <packagename>
  • Uninstall a package
• dpkg –l
  • Lists all installed packages
• respring
  • Respring your device from the command line

A couple of things to note is that for install and remove, you can list multiple packages separated by a space. When searching, the beginning of each line is the package name. Sometimes it will be a single word, though usually it will follow the patter com.companyname.appname. 

Even if you only ever plan on using Cydia for managing your packages, I would highly recommend installing Apt (along with syslog). Ever installed something that really screwed your phone? Ever been stuck in a reboot or respring loop? I know I have, and it’s no fun. What option do you have other than restoring? Well, if you’ve got Apt at your disposal you can connect via SSH and remove the offending package if you know what it is. Otherwise you can do the old ‘tail –f /var/log/syslog’ and watch for clues as to the which app is responsible.

Somebody please correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I can tell, there is no difference in using apt vs Cydia other than having to manually respring or reboot as Cydia is able to detect which if either is necessary.