Complete Guide For Troubleshooting Your Cydia Issues

A couple of hours ago, we’ve posted a fix for people that experience Cydia crashes and empty packages and sources listings in the past week. The only problem is that, sometimes, a fix can open the door to a flood of unknown problems. In only a couple of hours, we received a couple of hundreds of emails regarding various Cydia issues.

The only problem is that most of the emails were pretty vague. “Cydia is crashing. PLS HELPPPPPP” , won’t help us at all, and you will never get an email back from us. In fact your emails will be deleted instantly. Sorry, but if you can explain your problem, we can’t provide you with a ( possible ) fix.

photo credits: dhobern

First of all, you need to understand that when you jailbreak your device, you decide to install Cydia and ICY and then Cydia fails, the only solution is to re-jailbreak your iDevice. No, you didn’t do nothing wrong. The jailbreaking tool that you used is causing this problem, and there is no fix for this.

Identifying the problem

A good idea is to identify the problem you experience. This can be easily done via MobileTerminal ( or via SSH ) , and sometimes this will also fix various issues you might have.

1. Load MobileTerminal and type:

  • su root
  • alpine ( or your password, if you changed it )
  • apt-get update

2. Read the log

Cydia crashing while loading

  • SSH into your device
  • Navigate to the /var/lib/apt/lists/
  • Delete everything except the “partial” folder
  • Reboot

OR

  • SSH into root/private/ect/apt/sources.list.d and remove all entries except saurik.list. ( by doing this , you will delete or the manual added repos )

You can’t add a repo

  • Make sure you got the right url, and also you type it right
  • Don’t forget the / at the end of the url
  • Make sure something is pumping juice into your device. Check WiFi, EDGE/3G
  • Sometimes is their fault, not yours. Pretty much all the repos have a forum behind them. Google for the forum related to the repo you want to add, and check the status of the repo. It might be down at that particular moment.

Source Error

Sometimes you will get a bzip2 error which means that a particular repo is not functioning properly. What you can do is to remove the source , but sometimes you won’t be able to remove it, or the problem persists. In that case you can:

  • SSH into your device
  • Navigate to the /etc/apt/ folder
  • Backup the cydia.list OR sources.list.d file
  • Edit the cydia.list OR sources.list.d file with a text editor and remove the entry related to the problematic source
  • Reboot

Cydia icon no longer visible on your SpringBoard

This is not a common issue, but it can happen. If Cydia is no longer visible on your SpringBoard after you installed a new package yo can:

  1. Reboot your device ( yeah, pretty dumb but it may work )
  2. Use an app called gUICache to rebuild the cache. The only problem is that this is a Cydia app, and if you don’t have it installed already, well… ( this can also be used for any app that you might have, and its icon wont show on your SpringBoard after installation )
  3. If none of the steps above fixed your problems, you can always fix your problem via SSH:
  • SSH into /applications/cydia.app
  • Copy the icon.png to your computer
  • Delete icon.png from the device
  • Respring and a white icon will appear for Cydia.
  • Copy the icon.png back to /applications/cydia.app
  • Respring and the normal icon should be there.

Reinstalling Cydia

This is the most drastic method and your last resort. There are actually two methods for reinstalling Cydia:

  1. First thing you need to do is to download Cydia.deb and copy it via SSH into /var/mobile
  2. Load MobileTerminal and type:
    • su root
    • alpine ( or your password, if you changed it )
    • dpkg -i Cydia.deb
  3. Respring your iPhone

OR

  1. Load MobileTerminal and type:
    • su
    • alpine ( or your password, if you changed it )
    • apt-get remove cydia
    • apt-get install cydia
  2. Reboot your iPhone

This pretty much covers all the fixes for any Cydia issues you might have. If you know any tips and tricks for Cydia, let us know in the comments…