How to Hide the Cydia App Icon After Jailbreaking an iPhone

A common problems encountered after jailbreaking for spy software users, is the Cydia icon, which shows on the home screen of your device. If you don’t want people to know that your iPhone had been jailbroken, then the Cydia icon should be removed or hidden. In this article, we will take a closer look at this issue, and give you a few simple tricks to remove or hide the Cydia App Icon after jailbreaking your iDevice. This does not uninstall the app, and I am merely going to show you how to remove the icon that appears on the screen. The jailbreak remains intact and the Cydia App store can still be accessed.

Why Do You Need To Hide Cydia?

If you are planning to install spy or monitoring software onto your Apple device—be it an iPad or an iPhone—you have to have it Jailbroken. Now when the device had already been Jailbroken, an app icon will be left on the home screen, which is called the Cydia App. There’s a few reasons why you might want to hide this from others. For one, the most legitimate reason, is to better preserve anti-theft features and not giving away the possibility of the device being tracked, if it ever got stolen, lost or in the wrong hands. The power of being able to watch, take pics, video and audio of the thief, is a priceless advantage to have. But truth be told, many users of monitoring apps want to hide the Cydia icon because they are illegally spying on someone, such as their spouse. We do not suggest doing so, unless you’re certain it’s completely legal in your state or country, and if you still decide to do it, know that only you are liable for invasion of privacy.

That big fat icon spills your Jailbreaking secret, so naturally, you’d want it removed. The thing is, Cydia is like a store where you find all the software apps that are not supplied by Apple. You cannot easily remove it, without a little guidance that is. So how can you hide the Cydia app from your springboard?

Easy Way to Hide Cydia App Icon 

There are different apps and tools that offer the option to effectively remove or “hide” an app icon from your  home screen. With the lastest iOS 7 and iOS 8 updates, a few favorites have stood the test of time and remain the most pupalr to use for this specific need. My favorite was SBSettings, because it offers a whole slide down menu with useful shortcuts to turn on and off Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS, close all apps at once, and more.  However, since the iOS 7 update, Apple has introduced their own Control Center which pretty much does everything SBSettings offers. There’s also another popular option, which is more of a straight to the point solution, called POOF. What the POOF app does, is create a list of all your installed apps and allow you to hide the ones you don’ want to appear on the springboard. Either app needs to be downloaded from Cydia initially.

SBSettings

From the Cydia app, run a search for SBSettings in order to download and insatll the app. Once installed, you will be able to bring down the SBSettings control panel by simply swiping across the up-most part of your iPhone screen. Pretty much swipe left to right or right to left at the very top and voila, the menu should appear. Next, hit “More…” for additional options and locate “Hide Icons”. From the list, locate the Cydia app and simply turn the slider to Off and the icon will no longer appear on your home screen or spring board.

POOF

Poof has become a more popular way of accomplishing the task of hiding Cydia or any app icon for that matter. In the same manner, Poof needs to be downloaded and installed from Cydia. Once installed and launched, a full list of apps appears for which you can turn a slider on and off to hide each individual app icon of your choice. Big Boss repo is a required app in order to make Poof! function properly. It does not offer any additional functions or control panels, which makes it easier to use for the specific goal of hiding apps from the springboard.

The Issue with Just Hiding Cydia

The problem that I bring up to users about hiding the Cydia icon is regarding the fact that you have to use another app to get it done, which means it can fairly easily be spotted by a tech-savvy user. Someone who knows about and understands the essentials of jailbreaking an iDevice, will certainly spot the Poof! app or SBSettings and still know that the device was jailbroken. While beginner or everyday peolpe would not know the difference and possibly even ignore the significance of the Cydia app. So in a way, this technique or stealth strategy is sort of broken, unless you decide to do the irreversible, which is to hide both Cydia and Poof or SBSettings for example.

If you hide both icons, there’s a much better chance that an unauthorized user will not instantly detect or spot the jailbreak. The problem is that, once they are both hidden, and you no longer have access to the app that allows you to hide/unhide icons, you can’t get Cydia back without some added effort. The reason why I still created this post, is because most Spy App software users do not jailbreak the device for any other reason than installing the monitoring and tracking apps. With that said, once you have the app installed, you can permanently hide both Cydia and Poof! while retaining the spy software capabilities and not really caring about using Cydia to download more apps. This will better lead a theif to think he is safe keeping the iPhone or iPad in his possession, unknowing of his pending arrest for stealing it from you.

Conclusion

If all of this sounds way too complicated for you, if you hate anything that has to do with advanced settings or configuration of technology and electronics, maybe this is not the way to go about monitoring your iDevices. If you have gone through some of the spy app reviews, you may have fallen on our full review of mSpy software. They, along with Mobistealth, just so happen to offer a unique service that uses iCloud to log and monitor any type of iDevice, without the need to jailbreak! It’s not as capable of a service, but it also costs less. Keep in mind that you need the iCloud login password, as well as ensuring that backups are turned on. Whatever iCloud can backup will be monitored through your online dashboard.