Tutorial: How To Replace the Pink biteSMS Icon With the Stock SMS Icon

Jailbreaking is without a doubt one of the best features about owning an iPhone. Not only are there some totally cool apps that you couldn’t get your hands on otherwise, but you can fully customize your iPhone’s look to fit your style.

biteSMS is one such application that gives users much more functionality than Apple’s stock offering. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could completely replace the stock SMS application with biteSMS, all the way down to the look and name of the app icon? Indeed it would be, that’s why we’ve created an in-depth tutorial for you inside…

Tools You Will Need

While there are certainly other ways of accomplishing this task, this tutorial will use iFile, which is a highly recommended file management tool for jailbroken iPhones. You can find iFile on Cydia.

The reason I am using iFile is that it by far the simplest most straightforward way of doing what we want to do, and it’s all GUI based, no command line jargon to learn.

It will also be helpful if you have SBSettings, which we will use near the end of the tutorial.

Replace App Icon

Step 1: After you’ve downloaded iFile from Cydia, open it and navigate to the following directory: /var/Stash/Applications.(random.string)/MobileSMS.app

Step 2: Once there, tap the ‘edit’ button in the upper left-hand corner and then scroll down until you come to the ‘I’ section (it’s all in alphabetical order).

Step 3: To the left of each file name you will see a circle, tap the circle to select the following files:

Icon-Small.png
Icon-Small@2x.png
icon.png
icon@2x.png

Step 4: Tap the ‘share’ button in the bottom right-corner and select ‘Copy/Link’ from the menu, then tap ‘Done’ in the upper right-hand corner.

Step 5: Navigate to the following directory: /var/Stash/Applications.(random.string)/biteSMS.app

Step 6: Tap the ‘share’ button in the bottom right-corner and select ‘Paste’ from the menu, then tap ‘Done’ in the upper right-hand corner.

Step 7: You will see a warning message telling you that the files already exist, yes we know this, tap ‘Overwrite all’ to proceed for each instance, then tap ‘Done’ in the upper right-hand corner.

Step 8: Respring or Reboot your iPhone, and when you come back, your Pink biteSMS app icon should be replaced by the green stock Messages app icon.

Change the App’s Name

Now you’ll have two green SMS icons that look similar, although one will say ‘Messages’ and the other will say ‘biteSMS’. If you want to go all out, and replace the ‘biteSMS’ text with ‘Messages’, do the following:

Step 1: Go back into iFile and navigate to the following directory: /var/Stash/Applications.(random.string)/biteSMS.app.

Step 2: Scroll down until you find the ‘info.plist’ file. Tap the name of the file, and you will get a prompt to invoke a text editor; select Property List Viewer, and then tap ‘edit’ in the upper left-hand corner.

Step 3: Now you should see a lot of text that looks like html tags. About eight lines down you will see a ‘CFBundleDisplayName’ entry. Right below that you will see a ‘biteSMS’ entry. Replace ‘biteSMS’ with ‘Messages’ and then tap ‘Save’ and then ‘Done’ in the upper right-hand corner.

Step 4: Respring or Reboot your iPhone again, and when you come back, the text for ‘biteSMS’ should be replaced with ‘Messages.’ Now you have a fully stock looking SMS app icon that is actually pointing to biteSMS!

Hide the Old Messages App

The only problem with this is that you will now have two identical looking app icons; one pointing to the stock SMS app, and one pointing to biteSMS. The best way that I’ve found to remedy this is by hiding the icon that points to stock Messages using SBSettings’ ‘Poof’ feature.

Step 1: In SBSettings, navigate to the ‘More’ option under ‘System Options’ and then select ‘Hide Icons.’

Step 2: Turn the second ‘Messages’ icon to ‘Off’ and exit SBSettings by pressing the Home button, your iPhone should automatically respring.

Now you should have a full fledge working copy of biteSMS, but no one will be able to tell simply by looking at your Home screen!

What do you think? Was this tutorial helpful? Let us know by commenting below.