OK I did it, and may have f’ed up a bit. I have a iPhone 4 running iOS 5.1.1, I decided not to upgrade to 6 back then and now 7 seems too much OS for it from what I heard. So I decided to jailbreak it to have some fun and see what it can do.
1 - it is jailbroken
2 - I lost all my icons except for the basic ones, can not restore from iTunes (some error message), so I lost my paid apps, but can redownload them but would have to repay for the ones that cost $
3 - itunes backup seems to no longer have the full backup anymore - i think
4 - iCloud was backed up before jailbreaking. I have not touched that and turned the backup to iCloud off for now.
From what I see I have 2 possible choices:
1 - Stay with iOS 5.1.1 jailbroken, rebuy what I need
or
2 - upgrade to iOS 7, jailbreak gone, restore from iCloud and get my apps back
Is this basically correct?
If I stay with the jailbreak, and decide that is the way to go can I turn on iCloud and use that to back up my jailbroken device (knowing that my old backup will be deleted)?
If I upgrade to iOS 7 will I be able to restore all my paid apps from iCloud, or will they disappear?
Well the process is that you are supposed to back up the phone before jail breaking, and once you have competed the jail break, you do a restore, and that gets back all the apps.
One concrete solution is to check and see if you have any previous back ups from weeks or months ago, you can still restore from those.
As for repaying for apps, first I have heard of it, but its probably a good time to figure out if all those apps are useful, or can you start pruning.
Restore to factory original, yes , but with ios 7, apparently you can no longer jail break. But we have heard that one before as well.
Regardless of what iOS you’re using, jailbroken or not, any apps that you actually paid for in the first place you WILL NOT need to pay for again as long as you’re downloading them with the same Apple ID. Even if it looks like you’ll be paying again, trust me, you won’t. Try one (the cheapest paid one if you don’t believe me) and see what happens.
Declan The issue seems to be with the restore, I go to restore and it pops up with a error when it goes to check my apple ID, which I have read that Apple checks for jailbreaking before allowing a restore now. So it is possible I still have the restore before I jailbroke on my computer, but without going to iOS7 (which removed the jb) it appears Apple won’t allow me to restore.
I still have my untouched iCloud backup before the jb as well.
But you are right about it may be better to start new, I did have so much junk on it and was pushing the memory limits as well. Not much was paid apps and of the paid ones not many were still being used, so not a big expense to rebuy a few if needed.
I will try as there are some I would need to get back, even if I had to buy them, and some I would like to get back, hoping this will work. Will report back.
I like the jailbreak a lot. The iPhone just works so much better, more fluid to how I use it, being able to change just a few things (I think their called twerks) made all the difference. Things like triple click the home button anytime and I get a flashlight in the ‘on’ position (or ‘off’ if it’s ‘on’ - no app needed) instead of the useless triple click for ‘voice over’, immediate access to bluetooth, things that make sense.
Luckily all in all most everything was stored externally as well, especially the photos recently transferred into dropbox, and after this experience I am all the less likely to depend on Apple services but try to use other ones that don’t restrict. After using a jb iPhone I don’t think I could go back, a new iPhone is too problematic to jb and it doesn’t work right without it. Though the jb seemed to put a lot of life back into the iPhone, when it is time it looks like Android here I come.
Update, yes I can get my paid apps back w/o rebuying them. Today the button switched from the price to the word install.
Which makes me think that perhaps there was a issue with connecting wit Apple yesterday to verify my Apple ID and maybe that’s why I could not reinstall???
Another option is to upgrade, but not to 7.x. There are jailbroken versions of iOS 6.x out there, and you can upgrade to one of those and keep the jailbreak. I don’t know how to do this, but I think it’s pretty similar to the process to jailbreak originally.
Just in case you’re not aware, IOS 7 has a flashlight app built in and access to it and the Bluetooth toggle are just a swipe away at any time (in the default configuration).