About a month ago, I jailbroke my iPhone and made a list of my top 10 Cydia apps at the time. As everything else in life, that list has since evolved, and looking back at it today I felt like it needed to be revisited. The main reason why I need to write about that list is because some of the apps that I found cool at the time turned out to be inadequate in the long run. So I’ll give you my current top 10 Cydia apps, now with 100% more knowledge!

1. Cydia: Obviously. This application is basically a GUI frontend to APT running on the ramdisk. If that didn’t make sense to you, well let’s just say it’s an alternative community-powered App Store. Also has great management tool as well as a nifty Storage display.
2. WinterBoard: This application allows you to customize pretty much everything you might want to customize on your iPhone. The interesting thing about it is that as a bonus to the default options, you can install plugins that are available for it in Cydia – and there are a lot of them. Themes for the LockScreen, SMS, Applications, SpringBoard, Keyboard, Sounds and much more.
3. MakeItMine: Allows you to customize the carrier name that appears in the status bar (at the top) as well as the banner (the clock).
4. OpenSSH: Allows you to SSH to your device as root (so be careful!)
5. SBSettings: Adds a bunch of configuration option such as hiding icons, toggling WiFi/SSH/Bluetooth and more. There are also a bunch of plugins for it. Just the ability to hide the annoying Stocks, Youtube, iTunes, Notes and Calculator icons I never use is really refreshing.
6. Cycorder: Allows you to record videos on your iPhone, which is a seriously neglected feature by Apple.
7. Emoji – Enables the Japanese Emoji keyboard that, for some reason, is disabled with some carriers. Allows you to add emoticons to your SMS/emails. Only compatible with iPhones and other Emoji-capable devices obviously. You can also enable this manually.
8. NoCamSound: Pretty self-explanatory name. Disables the “shutter sound” when you take a picture. WinterBoard plugin.
9. StatusNotifier: Adds icons in the top status bar for SMS, emails and calls, near the battery display.
10. Clippy: System-wide clipboard. Implements copy & paste.

Those who didn’t make the cut are Qik, Scrobble, Veency and Netatalk. Why? For Qik, I found it extremely bandwidth intensive when not running on a WiFi network. Streaming over 3G, at least with my carrier, is not really possible. For Scrobble, Veency and Netatalk, the reason is the same for all of them. They are three useful applications, but they’re always running in the background, which steadily sucks battery juice. My iPhone, which usually lasts for a whole day without any problem unless I use it intensively, was at 60% after only 3 hours. Not really a good thing. OpenSSH, on the other hand, is also a daemon that runs in the background but, contrary to the other power-eating daemons, you can deactivate it via a useful shortcut in SBSettings, so I only enable it when I need to SSH in.

That about covers it. Worth jailbreaking? I think so.