Regardless of how you feel about Apple, it is difficult to deny that their ideas are both innovative and stylish, however, I digress.

The vast majority of individuals own one of Apple’s well-know smart phones. That being said, the vast majority of iPhone users know little about the capabilities of their device. Most people tend to accept the iPhone for what it is and that is that. There are, however, a handful of individuals (including myself) that are dissatisfied with the various restrictions that owning an iDevice imposes on you.

So, what is the point of this blog post? Well, if you are one of the minority, you will most likely have jailbroken your iDevice. Why jailbreak? The short and effective answer is that jailbreaking greatly enhances your device, allowing you to customize and modify it as you see fit. Unfortunately, I will not discuss how to jailbreak here, as it goes beyond the scope of this tutorial.

This tutorial is aimed at those who have already jailbroken their device, but are unsure of what to do next. The first thing you will want to do, is enable SSH access to your iDevice. What does this do, you ask? It enables you to access your device’s file system from a PC or Mac, allowing you to freely modify the files on your device, as well as transfer files such as customized themes to and from the device.

 

So, without further ado, let’s get right into it.

Step One:

Ensure that your iPhone/iPad is jailbroken. Then, go to Cydia, which should be located somewhere on your homescreen, and type ‘OpenSSH’ into the search bar. Click on ‘OpenSSH’ and click ‘Install’.

Step Two:

Move away from your iDevice for a moment. If you are using a Mac, open the ‘Terminal’ application. If you are using a Windows PC, download and install WinSCP from here (Alternatively, you could use some other SSH tool).Open one of the two programs and you are almost done.

Step Three:

Go back to your iDevice. Now it is time for you to connect to your preferred wifi network if you have not already done so. After you have connected, you will need to check what your IP address is. To do this, on your iDevice, go to:
Settings > Wi-Fi > Networks
Click on the arrow next to the network you are connected to. Your IP address should be listed with some additional information that is not needed for this tutorial.

Step Four:

Go back to the SSH program that you are using and connect to your device. If you are using a Mac, you will need to run the following command in Terminal:
ssh root@<ip-address>
(Where ‘<ip-address>’ is replaced by the IP you found in the previous step).

If you are a Windows user, the process of SSH’ing via WinSCP should be rather straight forward. Simply, type root into the ‘username’ field. Then, type alpine into the ‘password’ field (you may wish to change this password later) and type the IP address into the ‘host name’ field. As for the protocol, make sure that it is set to SFTP.

Step Five:

If you are presented with any warning messages, do not panic, this is normal. Click ‘Allow’/’Yes’ to dismiss the message(s).
If everything checks out okay, then congratulations! You have successfully, SSH’ed into your iDevice, and you now have a vast sea of options at your disposal, however, be warned that mindlessly editing the files on your device can lead to problems. Only edit files if you know what you are doing, or have done prior research!