Unlock real app backgrounds on your jailbroken iPhone or iPad with the bakgrunnr

One of the things Apple continues to improve on the iOS and iPadOS platforms with every major yearly software update is multitasking, and while they’ve achieved leaps and bounds over the years while maintaining minimal impact on a device’s limited system resources, one thing that we can honestly say is still lacking is true, full-fledged application backgrounding.

It remains to be seen if Apple will ever integrate true application backgrounding into its mobile operating system experience, but if you’re jailbroken, then you won’t need to wait that day to come. A newly released and free jailbreak tweak dubbed bakgrunnr by iOS developer udevs lets you have this ability right now, starting today.

The new bakgrunnr tweak provides a number of useful features that will make application backgrounding as user-friendly as humanly possible. Those features include:

An expiration time, after which the backgrounded app stops backgrounding
A Home Screen indicator, intended to help you remember which apps are backgrounded
Tons of user-facing options
Easy toggling with an integrated Control Center toggle
And more…

An example of the Home Screen indicator appears in the screenshot embedded above. Take careful note of the small sandglass symbol next to the YouTube app – when this happens, YouTube can continue playing media in the background even when you aren’t actively in the YouTube app and watching the video. This is insanely useful if you use YouTube to listen to your favorite music.

Once installed, you’ll find a dedicated preference pane in the Settings app where bakgrunnr can be configured however you want:

Here, you will be able to:

Toggle bakgrunnr on or off on demand
Manage applications that you want to enable backgrounding for
Choose your preferred Home Screen indicator:
- None
- Orange dot
- Sandglass icon
Indicate even apps on the Home Screen Dock (Beta)
Reset all options to their defaults
Respring your device (not necessary to save changes)

Digging deeper into the application management aspect of things, users can pick the apps that they want to enable backgrounding for and then adjust parameters for backgrounding as needed:

Options here include enabling or disabling backgrounding on a per-app basis
Choosing whether the app gets suspended or terminated after the timer runs out
Configure how long the timer should run before suspending or terminating a backgrounded app

At first glance, bakgrunnr seems like a no-brainer for someone who wants to get more performance out of their device. It’s like that backgrounding certain apps will result in more battery drain, but if you’ve always wanted to have background audio in YouTube without paying for a frivolous monthly subscription, then this is a great way to circumvent that requirement.

Those interested in trying the new bakgrunnr tweak can download it for free from udevs’ personal repository via their favorite package manager. The tweak supports jailbroken iOS 13 devices.

If you aren’t already using udevs’ repository, then you can add it to your package manager of choice with the following URL: