iOS’ backgrounding capabilities leave a lot to be desired, but a new jailbreak tweak dubbed TrueBackground by iOS developer tangxianhai just might be able to help.
At its very core, TrueBackground is a background manager that permits apps to continue operating even after closing them with the Home Button. For example, now you can:
- Download or upload files in the background while you do something else
- Leave the Twitch app while maintaining a live stream in the background
- And much more…
As for setting TrueBackground up, the tweak adds a preference pane to the settings app where you can toggle the tweak on or off on a per-app basis:
This list shows every app installed on your device, but it’s divided into two sections. The top portion includes native apps, while the bottom consists of those you’ve downloaded from the App Store. Whenever you enable an app from here, it will begin to background more efficiently than it did out of the box.
For obvious performance reasons, you might want to refrain from toggling TrueBackground for every single app installed on your device. Instead, you can optimize system resources by limiting the tweak to the apps you need backgrounding for the most.
Citing the developer, TrueBackground works with jailbroken iOS 10.0-10.2 devices; but from our testing, we found the tweak’s backgrounding capabilities to be intermittent, depending on the app. Case in point, we couldn’t get YouTube videos to continue playing in the background with TrueBackground, which might be a deal-breaker for some.
If you’d like to give TrueBackground a try for yourself, you can download it from Cydia’s BigBoss repository for $1.99.
Are you satisfied with iOS’ stock backgrounding capabilities, or do you wish it could do more? Let us know in the comments below!