It’s fair to say that majority of the users jailbreak their iOS device with the intention of installing one or two essential packages to improve the overall experience which Apple provides out of the box. For those individuals, Cydia is thought of purely as a third-party app store and interacted with as such. However, there are also a number of power users who are passionate about jailbreaking and occasionally want to peek inside the executable files that make up the tweaks that they’re installing. If you happen to be one of those, and want to gain access to a .DEB file through your device then carry on reading.
Step 1: Launch Cydia and navigate to the Search tab. Search for APT 0.7 Strict and install.
TIP: If APT 0.7 Strict doesn’t show up in search results then try changing the Cydia settings to ‘Developer.’
Step 2: Locate the Cydia hosted package that you wish to get the .DEB file of. Navigate to the bottom of the product page and find the unique Bundle ID of the package. This will most likely be in the reverse domain name format: com.developer.thePackageName. Make a note of the ID.
Step 3: Launch your favorite terminal app of choice and type in ‘su‘ to login as root. When prompted, enter the root password for the device. If the root password has never been changed then the default password is: alpine
TIP: It’s recommended to change the default password to something a little more complex when possible.
Step 4: When logged in as root, type in apt-get -d install [Bundle ID]. The [Bundle ID] section will of course be replaced with the unique reverse domain name ID that was recorded in step 2. If the on-screen information displays any type of prompt then read and accept by pressing ‘Y’.
Step 5: Exercise some patience and wait until the terminal app has finished doing it’s thing. When the process is complete the .DEB file can be accessed by using iFile (or something similar) by navigating to the following directory:
/var/cache/apt/archives.
Like most processes, there are a couple of things to note. If a particular jailbreak tweak depends on the installation of any dependencies then they will also be downloaded as part of this process. It’s also worth noting that this backdoor method can’t be used to download and acquire any commercial packages unless they have been purchased legitimately. The default repositories have tight enough security to prevent this, and rightly so.
For tutorials on how to jailbreak, check out:
- iOS 7 – 7.0.4 Jailbreak: Download Evasi0n 7 For iPhone 5s, 5c, 5, iPad, iPod touch [Windows / Mac]
- Jailbreak iOS 7 – 7.0.4 Untethered On iPhone 5s, 5c, 5, 4s And More With Evasi0n 7 [Video Tutorial]
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