Downtime podcast #387: In loving memory of the HomePod

Sebastien and Cody discuss the wild ride of last week’s AirPods 3 rumors and give their thoughts on talk of a bigger iPhone battery. The pair also talk about Apple discontinuing the original HomePod and what that means for the fledgling smart speaker line. Finally, they answer listeners' questions.

Spectral gives jailbreakers a sleeker Now Playing interface with an audio visualizer

Given that iOS devices continue to be some of the best music players on the market today, it’s not surprising that we continue to see more and more jailbreak tweaks for pwned handsets that try to out-do Apple at their own game, or at the very least, offer a level of personalization for the end user that otherwise wouldn’t be available on a stock handset.

For those wanting to expand on Apple’s award-winning music player experience, a new jailbreak tweak dubbed Spectral by iOS developer Beckett O’Brien just might be of interest.

WidgetRadius brings more consistent corner radiuses to legacy Today widgets on iOS 14

We graciously applaud Apple for introducing a worthwhile widget experience in iOS 14. It’s leaps and bounds better than what shipped with iOS 13 and earlier, and thanks to strong-willed app developers, these new widgets are exponentially more versatile than their predecessors.

Kind words aside, one thing that really bugs me about the iOS 14 widget experience is that Apple appears to have made no effort to help legacy widgets conform to the newer design standard. More specifically, when compared side-by-side, newer widgets have a rounder corner radius than legacy ones.

Hestia brings jailbreak detection bypass capabilities to pwned iOS 11-14 devices

Whether you’re new to jailbreaking or you’ve been jailbreaking for a long time, one thing we all have in common is that we’ve come across an app that doesn’t want to work on our pwned device. In most cases an error message materializes when launching certain types of apps, such as banking, media streaming, or the gaming variety that bar usage on jailbroken devices.

This is a common quandary known as jailbreak detection, and it’s where the app developer tries to prevent jailbroken devices from accessing their app to prevent unauthorized changes, cheats, or even security breaches. As common as jailbreak detection might be, it’s not fool-proof. We often see workarounds in the form of jailbreak detection bypasses, which can prevent certain apps from discerning that you’re jailbroken, and this prevents such frustrating messages from appearing in the first place.

Sileo updated to v2.0.1 with extensive list of fixes & improvements, now open source

If you’ve been following news in the jailbreak community recently, then you’ve probably caught wind about Taurine, the upcoming iOS & iPadOS 14.0-14.3-supported jailbreak tool for all devices. More specifically, the project has entered internal beta testing and will be released to the general public in the near future.

Taurine, much like Odyssey for iOS & iPadOS 13 and Chimera for iOS 12 before it, will utilize the Sileo package manager out of the box as opposed to Cydia, and given that Taurine is nearing a public release, it may not come as much of a surprise that the Sileo Team has launched a fresh update for its package manager.